Personalities And Cultures

Neither human nature nor personality can be independent of culture. Human beings share certain social norms or rules within their cultural groups. Over 2000 years ago, Aristotle held that man is by nature a social animal. Similarly, Xun Kuang (298-238 B.C.), a Chinese philosopher, pointed out that humans in social groups can not function without shared guidance or rules. This book is designed to provide readers with a perspective on how people are different from, and similar to, each other --both within and across cultures. One of its goals is to offer a practical guide for people preparing to interact with those whose cultural background is different from their own.

The Five-Factor Model Across Cultures was designed to further an understanding of the interrelations between personality and culture by examining the dominant paradigm for personality assessment - the Five-Factor Model or FFM - in a wide variety of cultural contexts. This volume provides a comprehensive overview of contemporary research and theory about personality traits and culture that is extremely relevant to personality psychologists, cross-cultural psychologists, and psychological anthropologists.

The diversity of human behavior is one of the most fascinating aspects of human biology. What makes our individual attitudes, lifestyle and personalities different has been the subject of many physiological and psychological theories. In this book the emphasis is on understanding the genetic and environmental causes of these differences. Genes, Culture, and Personality is an expansive account of the state of current knowledge about the causes of individual differences in personality and social attitudes. Based on almost two decades of empirical research, the authors have made a significant contribution to the debate on genetic and cultural inheritance in human behavior. The book should be required reading for psychologists, psychiatrists, sociobiologists, and geneticists.

This work provides a comprehensive analysis of the relationship between cultural variables - ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation - and personality disorders, for example, antisocial, borderline, dependent, histrionic and narcissistic. It examines how cultural variables can effect the conceptualization, epidemiology, and treatment of personality disorders.

Franziska Krüger presents two quantitative cross-cultural studies that examine the generalizability of the Zone of Tolerance and the Confirmation/Disconfirmation-Paradigm across countries. She investigates the potential influence of Hofstede's cultural dimensions and the Big Five personality traits on the models' variables. As a result, the studies confirm that both models can be used to explain customer satisfaction and its determinants across national borders and cultures.

Fischer uses evolutionary psychology to explain why people's personality and values are both similar and different across cultures worldwide.

Throughout the world as in the United States, psychologists are increasingly being called upon to evaluate clients whose backgrounds differ from their own. It has long been recognized that standard personality and psychopathology assessment instruments carry cultural biases, and in recent years, efforts to correct these biases have accelerated. The Handbook of Cross-Cultural and Multicultural Personality Assessment brings together researchers and practitioners from 12 countries with diverse ethnic and racial identities and training to present state-of-the-art knowledge about how best to minimize cultural biases in the assessment of personality and psychopathology. They consider research methodology, the design and construction of standard objective and projective tests, the use of measures of acculturation, racial identity, and culture-specific tests, the social etiquette of service delivery, and the interpretation of test data for clinical diagnosis. Ranging widely through all the relevant issues, they share a common collective vision of how culturally competent services should be delivered to clients. The Handbook offers the first comprehensive view of a consistent approach to cultural competence in assessment--a necessary precursor of effective intervention. It will become an indispensable reference for all those whose practice or research involves individuals with different ethnic and racial identities.