The chapters of this book are written by seasoned scientists who have devoted most of their research careers to cross-cultural or cultural psychology. Many achievements are reported and for good reasons. Over the last half century the field has grown in methodological and theoretical sophistication and a large number of empirical studies have been conducted. More important, the field has contributed greatly to the now widely held conviction that cultural context matters a great deal for human behaviour, including its covert aspects, such as thoughts, meanings and values.

The overall tone of the volume is positive, as was to be expected from researchers who often have contributed extensively to the topics they describe. This does not imply complacency; most chapters contain critical comments and all of them portray the need for further development. For example, Bond (this volume), who radiates an infectious enthusiasm, also describes as unfinished his long-term voyage from a Canadian background into Chinese culture. A few others like Jahoda (this volume) and Eckensberger (this volume) raise broader criticisms on the current state of the field. For reasons to be explained further on I tend to share such uneasiness.

Compared to communication in other species, human speech is a highly differentiated faculty, enabling us to communicate complex information in an efficient way. There are many aspects to the psychological study of language, including its production and understanding (listening, articulation, memorization), and the use of indirect means of communication through writing and reading. In all of these aspects cross-cultural differences can be observed. In this chapter we will deal with the main theme of cross-cultural psycholinguistic research, namely the extent to which underneath different words and rules of grammar there is commonality between languages.

In the first section research on linguistic relativity is presented, addressing the question of to what extent speaking a particular language influences one's thinking. We look at two topics on which much of the discussion about linguistic relativity has been focussed, namely perception and categorization of colors, and orientation in space. We present the case of relativism and counterarguments based on empirical cross-cultural studies. The second section is on universalist approaches, especially the notion of universal grammar. Again, not only the evidence in favor, but also challenges are presented.

On the Internet we present some additional information. There is an entry on language development (Additional Topics, Chapter 8), pointing out some of the complexities a child has to master in order to acquire a language.

The notion of development comes into this book at three levels. First, there is phylogenetic development. It deals with variation across species, and the emergence of new species over long periods of time. This form of development will be discussed in Chapter 11. Second, the term “development” can refer to cultural changes in societies. Development in this sense will be touched upon in Chapter 10 (where we discuss the anthropological tradition of cultural evolution), and in Chapter 18 (where we focus on national development). In the present and the following chapter we are mainly concerned with the course of development of the individual through the life span, or ontogenetic development. In this chapter, we will focus on cultural similarities and differences in developmental patterns in infancy and early childhood; the next chapter will deal with late childhood, adolescence and adulthood.

Culture as context for development

Individual development can be considered as the outcome of interactions between a biological organism and environmental influences. Although we consider the separation of “nature” and “nurture” to be largely an outdated distinction (see Chapter 11, and the last section of Chapter 12), the relative importance of the biological and the cultural (environmental-experiential) components of behavior has formed the major dimension underlying the differences between various schools of thinking on ontogenetic development in the psychological literature.

In this chapter, we shift our focus from behavior that is primarily social to behavior that is cognitive. Social cognition was discussed in Chapter 4, where the phenomena of attribution, conformity and self-construal were presented as social psychological manifestations of the cultural context. In Chapter 8, we shall return to a consideration of cultural aspects of cognition, where links between language and culture are explored. In this chapter we focus on the more traditional cognitive phenomena that deal with knowing and interpreting the world, using such notions as intelligence, abilities and styles. We begin with a brief overview of the historical legacy of thinking about how human populations are similar and different in their cognitive lives. In each of the subsequent sections we present four perspectives on relationships between cognition and culture, beginning with a set of conceptualizations that involve a unitary view of cognition (captured in the notion of general intelligence). Thereafter we present cognitive styles, which are general preferences to deal with the world in a particular way. The third perspective is one that focusses on the East–West contrasts in cognition, where there has been much recent research on differences in the cognitive life of western and East Asian populations. Finally, the fourth perspective is contextualized cognition, in which cognitions are seen as task-specific and embedded in sociocultural contexts.

At virtually the same time as the rise in cross-cultural studies of development, there has been a dramatic increase in interest in life span development, which covers not only the period from birth to maturity, but also continues through maturity to eventual demise (Baltes, Lindenberger and Staudinger, 2006). In this chapter, we examine cross-cultural variations in the developmental stages beyond the ones that were discussed in Chapter 2; these are childhood, adolescence and adulthood. After discussing cultural notions of childhood and adolescence, we will present evidence on how childhood experiences can explain cross-cultural variations in adulthood. In the section on adulthood, we will deal with mating, partnership and parenting across cultures. In the final section, we will discuss life span developmental and evolutionary approaches to late adulthood. The chapter concludes with reflections on the cross-cultural applicability of the developmental issues raised in the last two chapters.

Childhood and adolescence

As we have seen in the previous chapter, human development can be described in stages. There, we dealt with the first decade of life, comprising the two earliest stages, infancy and early childhood. While infancy is the period from birth to two years, childhood is mainly defined as the period after infancy and before sexual maturation.

The reader will have realized that this book offers a selective presentation of a diverse field. Necessarily many important points of view, empirical research studies and programs of application have not been mentioned, never mind given substantive treatment. Our attention, however, has not been random, but was guided by major themes and debates on the relationship between behavior and culture.

We have also taken the position that psychological processes are shared, species-wide characteristics. These common psychological qualities are nurtured, and shaped by enculturation and socialization, sometimes further affected by acculturation, and ultimately expressed as overt human behaviors. While set on course by these transmission processes relatively early in life, behaviors continue to be guided in later life by direct influence from ecological, cultural and sociopolitical factors. In short, we have considered culture, in its broadest sense, to be a major source of human behavioral diversity producing variations on underlying themes. It is the common qualities that make comparisons possible, and the variations that make comparisons interesting.

Our enterprise has some clearly articulated goals, and it is reasonable to ask whether the field of cross-cultural psychology generally, and this book in particular, has met them. In our view, one of the goals, as expressed in Chapter 1, has not been achieved: we are nowhere close to producing a universal psychology through the comprehensive integration of results of comparative psychological studies.

In this chapter we examine the relationship between the science and practice of psychology as it has developed in the western world, and the need for a culturally informed, relevant and appropriate psychology for all the world's peoples. Psychological knowledge in the west (hereafter referred to as western psychology) is often of little relevance to the majority world (a term used, for example, by Kağitçibaşi, 2007, in preference to “developing” or “Third” World). We accept and applaud the goal of advancing the development of a global psychology, one that is both valid and useful for all cultural populations. There are a number of possible paths toward this goal, including: an examination of the impact of the presence of western psychology on the psychology done in other societies; the development of indigenous psychologies in many distinct societies; and the pulling together of all of these psychologies into a universal psychology that is global in scope.

This move toward an international perspective has been increasingly important in recent years, including for the history of psychology (Brock, 2006), for the teaching of psychology (Karandashev and McCarthy, 2006) and for the practice of psychology (Stevens and Gielen, 2007).

In this chapter we focus on various lines of research that have been developed in order to answer the question to what extent emotions are similar or different across cultures. First, we focus on dimensional approaches. Similar to what has been done in cross-cultural research on personality (Chapter 5) and cognition (Chapter 6), some emotion researchers have tried to reveal common dimensions underlying the many emotions that we experience in daily life and to see whether these dimensions are the same (equivalent) across cultures. The second section addresses research on emotion words. In the absence of a clear definition of emotion terms, the words that people use in daily language have become important tools for cross-cultural researchers. The central question here is whether linguistic differences (differences in words) can be used to infer psychological differences (differences in experience; see also Chapter 8). The third section focusses on studies of specific aspects of emotions. Many contemporary researchers no longer try to define emotion in terms of a single criterion. Rather they use a componential approach, which assumes that emotions can be defined in many different emotion components (e.g., thoughts, feelings, action tendencies, psychophysiological experiences). An important feature of this approach is that cross-cultural differences are assumed to be independent for each component (Mesquita, Frijda and Scherer, 1997).

With growing migration, globalization and internationalization comes an increased need for an understanding of intercultural communication, as well as the use of this information for training people in order to make them more competent in dealing with intercultural issues. The field is very diverse, with publications from a wide variety of scientific and applied disciplines. For example, there is research in linguistics (especially sociolinguistics), sociology, cultural anthropology and cross-cultural psychology. Much of this variety can be surveyed in a handbook edited by Landis, Bennett and Bennett (2004). In this chapter, we mainly focus on the psychological aspects of intercultural communication and training, and point out important issues and studies from a psychological perspective.

This chapter contains three main sections, each representing a distinct area of intercultural communication and training. The first, on intercultural communication, describes the attempts of researchers to delineate which elements of communication are the sources of communication problems during intercultural encounters. This section is somewhat more theoretical than later sections because the main questions focus on the nature of intercultural communication rather than on the application of this knowledge. The second section concerns sojourners, those people who stay in another culture mostly for purposes of work or study (e.g., international exchange students). This is a special group of acculturating people that has already been discussed in Chapter 13.

As noted in Chapter 1, there is much more to a cross-cultural study than collecting data in two countries and comparing the results. Long ago Campbell (1970) warned that two-group comparisons usually are not interpretable: there are too many factors to which an observed difference can be attributed, including a lack of equivalence (cultural bias). In various chapters in Part I we have seen examples of competing interpretations of differences in behaviors across cultures. In the present chapter the scope for interpretation of cross-cultural data will be explored further. Both “culture” and “behavior” are somewhat abstract and diffuse concepts that are not accessible to scientific analysis without further specification. The process of specification is guided by the methods and research questions that are selected by researchers as well as by their theoretical and metatheoretical orientations. Usually method and theory are linked and this is the reason why we have combined them in the present chapter.

The first three sections refer back to the three themes and associated theoretical positions that we outlined in Chapter 1. In the first section we elaborate on the distinction between culture as external context and culture as internal to the person (internal context).

Within cross-cultural psychology it is important to understand the biological, as well as the cultural, bases of behavior. The focus is usually on the sociocultural environment and how it interacts with behavior; this may lead to an unbalanced view. Despite this joint importance, biological aspects are still emphasized rather rarely. Often, biology and culture are seen as opposites; what is labeled as cultural is not biological and what is labeled as biological is not cultural. As we mentioned in Chapter 1, and will describe in more detail here, the two are intricately related in a non-dichotomous way. In the ecocultural framework presented in Figure 1.1 we have included biological adaptation and genetic transmission among the concepts that have to be taken into consideration in cross-cultural psychology. For the understanding of behavior, its similarities as well as its cultural variations, the study of the biological basis is as essential as the analysis of sociocultural context.

In the first and second sections of this chapter we give a brief overview of some core concepts of the Darwinian theory of natural and sexual selection. The third section deals with evolutionary-based theories and methods to study animal and human behavior.