Cross-cultural affective neuroscience personality comparisons of Japan, Turkey and Germany

Cross-Cultural Affective Neuroscience

“…Therefore, the polarized findings that are produced by linguistically derived Big Five are related more to the (post-linguistic) tertiary processes, rather than primary processes. Supporting this argument, our studies showed that ANPS comparisons between Turkey and Unites States (Özkarar-Gradwohl et al., 2014) and between Japan, Turkey, and Germany (Özkarar-Gradwohl et al., 2018) did not show lower scores in the East and higher scores on the West, therefore did not lead to such East-West polarizations. Instead of that, each culture was found to have specific higher and/or lower scores on the basic affects shared by ANPS.…”

“…As the second common result, the gender effect obtained in the original study showing that females have higher scores than males on CARE and SADNESS (Davis et al., 2003) was also detected in the Spanish, French, Turkish, Italian, and German studies (Pahlavan et al., 2008; Abella et al., 2011; Pingault et al., 2012; Özkarar-Gradwohl et al., 2014; Pascazio et al., 2015; Montag et al., 2016a,b), pointing to a potential female “resonance” with attachment (CARE) and separation distress (SADNESS). As an exception, this gender effect was found to be just the opposite for the Japanese sample, where the Japanese males had significantly higher CARE and SADNESS compared to Japanese females (for detailed cross-cultural gender effect see Figure 2, Özkarar-Gradwohl et al., 2018). Moreover, culture-specific gender effects were also obtained, both Spanish and French females having higher scores than males on FEAR, Spanish females having higher scores than males on SEEKING, and French females showing lower scores than males on PLAY (Pahlavan et al., 2008; Abella et al., 2011).…”

“…FEAR, SADNESS, and ANGER were positively correlated with Neuroticism, high CARE and low ANGER were positively correlated with Agreeableness, SEEKING was positively correlated with Openness to Experience, and PLAY was positively correlated with Extraversion. On the other hand; Japan, Turkey, and Germany were found to carry both similar and culturally specific correlational patterns among ANPS and Big Five (Özkarar-Gradwohl et al., 2018). The suggestion that these correlational patterns among affective personality traits and Big Five need to be replicated across cultures needs further observation (Montag and Davis, 2018).…”

“…Constructed during the Zeitgeist of the Cold War when the world was extremely polarized, Big Five Model also produced findings that lead to consistent East-West polarizations, lower scores in the East and higher scores in the West (Triandis, 1997; Piedmont et al., 2002; Schmitt et al., 2007; Gurven et al., 2013). However, it is also argued that Big Five measures mostly the cognitive and behavioral characteristics of personality found in Western norms and oversees the universal subcortical affective characteristics (Özkarar-Gradwohl et al., 2018). Therefore, the polarized findings that are produced by linguistically derived Big Five are related more to the (post-linguistic) tertiary processes, rather than primary processes.…”

“…Although cross-cultural theories of self and cross-cultural neuroscientific studies of self are inclined to argue that two different types of self-exist, The recent debate over world-wide self-construals comparisons emphasizes that theoretical generalizations like “collectivistic East versus individualistic West” must be avoided, as different combinations of interdependency-independency is found in each culture (Vignoles et al., 2016). Our recent study carried among Japan, Turkey and Germany also showed that as interdependent self-construals decrease from East to West, a westward increase in independent self-construals does not exist (Özkarar-Gradwohl et al., 2018). Following these findings, we suggested that rather than relying on theoretical generalizations based on geographical localizations, self-construals must be explored empirically in each cross-cultural research.…”