The Big Five Inventory (BFI) is a self-report measure designed to assess the high-order personality traits of Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Neuroticism, and Openness. As part of the International Sexuality Description Project, the BFI was translated from English into 28 languages and administered to 17,837 individuals from 56 nations. The resulting cross-cultural data set was used to address three main questions: Does the factor structure of the English BFI fully replicate across cultures? How valid are the BFI trait profiles of individual nations? And how are personality traits distributed throughout the world? The five-dimensional structure was robust across major regions of the world. Trait levels were related in predictable ways to self-esteem, sociosexuality, and national personality profiles. People from the geographic regions of South America and East Asia were significantly different in openness from those inhabiting other world regions. The discussion focuses on limitations of the current data set and important directions for future research.

In this study, the integrated threat theory of prejudice was employed to examine Americans’ and Mexicans’ attitudes toward one another. According to the theory, four types of threat (realistic, symbolic, intergroup anxiety, and negative stereotypes) cause prejudice. These threats are thought to be caused in part by the amount and quality of intergroup contact. The results of two path analyses indicated that all four threats were significant predictors of attitudes in one sample or the other. Both the amount and quality of contact affected some types of threats. In particular, the quality of intergroup contact (voluntary, positive, individualized, and equal status) appears to play an important role in both intergroup anxiety and attitudes toward the other group.

As part of the International Sexuality Description Project, a total of 17,804 participants from 62 cultural regions completedthe RelationshipQuestionnaire(RQ), a self-reportmeasure of adult romanticattachment. Correlational analyses within each culture suggested that the Model of Self and the Model of Other scales of the RQ were psychometrically valid within most cultures. Contrary to expectations, the Model of Self and Model of Other dimensions of the RQ did not underlie the four-category model of attachment in the same way across all cultures. Analyses of specific attachment styles revealed that secure romantic attachment was normative in 79% of cultures and that preoccupied romantic attachment was particularly prevalent in East Asian cultures. Finally, the romantic attachment profiles of individual nations were correlated with sociocultural indicators in ways that supported evolutionary theories of romantic attachment and basic human mating strategies.

Coke, Batson, and McDavis have proposed a two-stage model of empathy-mediated helping, based on emotional arousal and perspective taking. We hypothesized that in addition, a dispositional factor-individual differences in empathy-and a situational factor-potential evaluation from others (demand)should be included in the process. A study was conducted in which female subjects received false galvanic skin response feedback, indicating that they had either high or low arousal during a broadcast of a person's need for help, as in the Coke et al. experiment. In addition, subjects were led to believe that the experimenter either did or did not know their level of arousal (demand vs. no demand). Subjects' premeasured dispositional empathy constituted the third (continuous) variable in the design. The effect of greater help following high-rather than low-arousal feedback found by Coke et al. was replicated. However, as predicted, this was true only for subjects higher in dispositional empathy in the demand condition. The implications of these results for a revised model of empathy-mediated helping are discussed.

The social context hypothesis states that people behave differently in different social groups because group norms and context-specific interpersonal relationships uniquely affect behavior. Consequently, a person who is a member of different, nonoverlapping social groups (i. e., the members of different groups are unacquainted) should be judged consensually on personality traits within each group; however, between groups there should be less agreement in judgments. This research focused on cultural moderation of the social context effect in two collective cultures (China and Mexico) with different norms for interpersonal relationships. Among Chinese, there was greater consensus in trait judgments within groups than between groups, whereas in Mexico, agreement within and between groups was equivalent. Culturally based relationship norms that affect cross-context consistency of behavior and, in turn, the consistency of trait judgments across groups were described.