Supervised by Jonathan Baron and Alan Fiske Are disgusting or disrespectful actions considered to be moral violations, even when they are harmless? Stories about victimless yet offensive actions (such as eating one's dead pet dog) were presented to Brazilian and U.S. adults and children, of high and low socioeconomic status. Results show that college students at elite universities judged these stories to be matters of social convention, or of personal preference. Most other subjects, especially in Brazil, judged the offensive actions to be universally wrong moral violations. Moral judgments were better predicted by affective reactions than by appraisals of harmfulness. These results support Shweder (1990), and Miller, Bersoff and Harwood (1990), and suggest that cultural norms and culturally shaped emotions have a substantial impact on the domain of morality and the process of moral judgment. Efforts to build cross-culturally valid models of moral judgment are discussed. v Table of Contents Acknowledgments .

Copyright and reuse:Sussex Research Online is a digital repository of the research output of the University.Copyright and all moral rights to the version of the paper presented here belong to the individual author(s) and/or other copyright owners. To the extent reasonable and practicable, the material made available in SRO has been checked for eligibility before being made available.Copies of full text items generally can be reproduced, displayed or performed and given to third parties in any format or medium for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-profit purposes without prior permission or charge, provided that the authors, title and full bibliographic details are credited, a hyperlink and/or URL is given for the original metadata page and the content is not changed in any way.Article accepted for publication in Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/xge0000175 © American Psychological Association (APA) This article may not exactly replicate the authoritative document published in the APA journal. It is not the copy of record. contrast between independence and interdependence does not adequately capture the diverse models of selfhood that prevail in different world regions. Cultural groups emphasize different ways of being both independent and interdependent, depending on individualism-collectivism, national socioeconomic development, and religious heritage. Our seven-dimensional model will allow future researchers to test more accurately the implications of cultural models of selfhood for psychological processes in diverse ecocultural contexts.Keywords: CULTURE; SELF-CONSTRUALS; INDEPENDENCE-INTERDEPENDENCE Twenty-five years ago, Markus and Kitayama (1991) published their classic article on culture and the self, proposing that people in different parts of the world tend to construe themselves in two fundamentally different ways. They argued that Western cultures are unusual in promoting an independent view of the self as bounded, unitary, stable, and separate from the social context, whereas cultures in other parts of the world emphasize an interdependent view of the self as closely connected to others, fluid, and contextually embedded. They proposed that people with independent self-construals would strive for self-expression, uniqueness, and self-actualization, basing their actions on personal thoughts, feelings, and goals. In contrast, people with interdependent self-construals would strive to fit in and maintain social harmony, basing their actions on situationally defined norms and expectations.Markus and Kitayama's (1991) proposals had a dramatic impact on social, personality and developmental psychology, challenging ethnocentric assumptions, drawing attention to cultural diversity, and providing conceptual tools for theorizing about it. Social and personality psychologists used measures and manipulations of self-construals to predict numerous outcomes: cognitive styles, well-being, self-regulation, selfesteem, communication styles, social anxiety, and pro...

The goal of this study was to examine demographic and individual difference variables that predict level of prosocial moral judgment and self-reported prosocial behavior and to test mediating or moderating relations among predictors. The relations of prosocial moral reasoning and self-reported prosocial behavior to perspective taking, sympathy, age, sociometric status, and gender-role orientation were examined with a sample of 149 Brazilian adolescents who completed a series of questionnaire measures. Prosocial moral judgment was expected to be predicted by both sympathy and perspective taking, whereas sympathy or prosocial moral judgment was expected to mediate the relations of femininity and perspective taking to prosocial behavior. Self-reported perspective taking and sympathy interacted when predicting prosocial moral judgment; adolescents who were high in either sympathy or perspective taking (or both) scored high in prosocial moral reasoning. A feminine orientation predicted sympathy and perspective taking, perspective taking predicted prosocial moral reasoning and sympathy, and sympathy had both direct and indirect paths (through moral judgment) to prosocial behavior. The findings generally were consistent with the contention that both the tendency to take others' perspectives and to sympathize are related to level of prosocial moral reasoning, which in turn motivates prosocial behavior. Moreover, patterns of correlations among variables were similar to those found in the United States.

O abuso sexual infantil é um problema de saúde pública, devido à elevada incidência epidemiológica e aos sérios prejuízos para o desenvolvimento das vítimas. A dinâmica desta forma de violência é complexa, envolvendo aspectos psicológicos, sociais e legais. Este estudo apresenta o mapeamento de fatores de risco para abuso sexual intrafamiliar identificados nos processos jurídicos do Ministério Público do Rio Grande do Sul - Brasil por violência sexual, no período entre 1992 e 1998. A análise de 71 expedientes apresenta o perfil das vítimas e a caracterização da violência sexual, dos agressores e das famílias. Os resultados apontaram que o desemprego, famílias reconstituídas, abuso de álcool e drogas, dificuldades econômicas e presença de outras formas de violência constituíram os principais fatores de risco associados ao abuso sexual. Tais resultados podem subsidiar ações preventivas e terapêuticas para situações de violência sexual contra crianças e adolescentes.