Wonderful explanation for arguing culture > personality - Use to cite in MS!

In search of culture's role in influencing individual social behaviour - Asian journal of social psychology
While Mendoza-Denton and Mischel (2007) focused on how socio-cultural contexts affect the formation of cognitive-affective units, Hong and Mallorie (2004; see also Hong, Morris, Chiu & Benet-Martínez, 2000) examined how cultures condition the availability and accessibility of different implicit theories that individuals use to interpret their social world. In comparison to these attempts, Bond separated the situation from personality, contending situations as socially shared affordances.

Culture may also play a role at a meta-level in affecting the ‘beta weights’ (i.e. how determining a component is in predicting the behaviour outcomes) of the four components and their interactions across contexts. On the one hand, cultures can promote or limit the experiences an individual may have. Bond argued that personality (P) may manifest in the situations an individual chooses to enter or avoid. However, an over-emphasis on the role of choice in the situations an individual is in may be a commitment of the fundamental attribution error. On the other hand, Weber (from Gerth & Mills, 1948) introduced the concept of ‘life chances’ in how economic-political factors constrain and limit the kinds of outcomes an individual can have. Similarly, cultures can funnel individual's life chances through the emphasis or rejection of certain practices, interpretations, and values (Kitayama & Markus, 1999). Values promoted by a community will be given more opportunities to be expressed (Mendoza-Denton & Mischel, 2007), consequently resulting in particular situations being more prevalent in some cultural contexts than others (Kitayama, Mesquita & Karasawa, 2006). In other words, cultures restrict the choices that are available to the individuals embedded within and provide the rules by which people are to make choices in their lives (Schwartz, 2000).

In addition, Bond discussed that the overlaps between P(S) and O(S) are likely to be greater in settings where pressure toward conformity is greater. This is interesting and can be related to recent advancements in research on inter-subjectivity and tight versus loose cultures. For example, Wan and colleagues (Wan et al., 2007; Wan, Torelli & Chiu, 2010) have shown that, at an individual level, the stronger the participants identify with the group, the more they would be affected by the consensual values of the group (vs their own personal values). At a cultural level, Gelfand and her colleagues (2011) have shown that some nations have clearer norms (consensus) and enhanced pressure for conformity to norms (i.e. tight cultures), whereas other nations are less so (i.e. loose cultures). In general, Chinese, in comparison to Americans, tend to have a higher identification with the national group (Hong, 2009). Likewise, Asian cultures are tighter than Western cultures (Gelfand et al., 2011). This implies that theories mainly emphasizing P would not be as applicable in understanding Asian psychology.

Furthermore, in this globalized era where cultures' juxtapose in the same social and temporal space (Chiu, Mallorie, Hean Tat Keh & Law,2009), individuals often possess multiple cultural knowledge systems (Hong et al., 2000). This adds a dynamic aspect to the traditional notion of cultural influence, as individuals' cultural knowledge systems can be differentially activated by their immediate social contexts. Depending on the particular context or situation, individuals vary in their use of specific cultural knowledge to understand, interpret, and behave (Chiu, Gries, Torelli & Cheng, 2011; Hong et al., 2000). As such, cultural influences can no longer be regarded as static, but dynamic.

he includes both the norms, O(S), and perception of the consensus of the norms, CO(S), as social factors affecting the individual's behaviours. Secondly, interestingly, he also proposes that the beta weight of O(S) and CO(S) would also be affected by the culture, such that the beta weight for O(S) and CO(S) to affect behaviour is stronger in collectivist cultures than in individualist cultures. Bond's proposal is a timely addition, as the recent discourses of intersubjectivity and tight versus loose cultures have shed light on the normative influences of culture. Culture provides individuals with shared representations, that individuals, subsequently, use to impart meanings.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com.chain.kent.ac.uk/doi/10.1111/ajsp.12016/full


ALSO see http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com.chain.kent.ac.uk/doi/10.1111/ajsp.12018/full

Research on Nostalgia

http://www.southampton.ac.uk/nostalgia/publications/

Sedikides, C., Wildschut, T., Routledge, C. R, Arndt, J., & Zhou, X. (2009). Buffering acculturative stress and facilitating cultural adaptation: Nostalgias as a psychological resource. In R. S. Wyer, Jr., C.-y. Chiu, & Y.-y. Hong (Eds.), Understanding culture: Theory, research, and application (pp. 361-378). New York, NY: Psychology Press.http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/09/science/what-is-nostalgia-good-for-quite-a-bit-research-shows.html - interesting, as they say feelings of nostalgia is universal. But I'm sure for Russians or more complain-lover cultures, making people become nostalgic won't have positive effects, at least not when instantly asked. I am ready for science to fail me!

Prof at Tilburg - some interesting research

http://publications.uvt.nl/repository/vingerhoets/publications.html

• Vingerhoets, A.J.J.M., Sanders, N., & Kuper, W. (1997). Health issues in international tourism: The role of health behavior, stress, and adaptation. In M. van Tilburg & A.J.J.M. Vingerhoets (Eds.), Psychological aspects of geographical moves: Homesickness and acculturation stress. (pp. 201-216). Tilburg: Tilburg University Press.
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• Becht, M.C., & Vingerhoets, A.J.J.M. (2002). Crying and Mood Change: a Cross-Cultural Study. Cognition and Emotion, 16(1), 87-101.
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• Hemert, D.A. van, Vijver, F.J.R. van de, & Vingerhoets, A.J.J.M. (2011). Country and crying: Prevalences and gender differences. Cross-Cultural Research, 45, 399-431.
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another study idea

perception of attractiveness of girls according to their major.

Possible Thesis Titles

Challenging the Gendered and Ethnicized Organization: The Role of Group Affirmation In Counteracting Ingroup Distancing among Muslim Women

A Consequence of Systemic Bias in the Workplace: Exploring the Role of Group Affirmation in Thwarting "Ingroup Distancing" among Minority Women

When You Distance Yourself from Your Own Comrades?: A Consequence of the Biased Organizational Culture

When Minority Members Distance Themselves from Their Own Group: A Consequence of the Biased Organizational Culture and the Role of Group Affirmation In Counteracting Ingroup Distancing

Since the 1980s, feminist critique of essentialist assumptions
about gender increasingly has employed an intersectionality
perspective to understand gender in relation to
other social identities, such as race, class, ethnicity and
sexual orientation. In contrast to models that suggest for
each minority status there is a simple accumulation of
disadvantage, such that the Black woman is doubly
disadvantaged compared to the Black man, the intersectionality
framework emphasizes the qualitative differences
among different intersectional positions. For example, “the
very meaning of manhood may vary when applied to one’s
own racial group as compared to another group; similarly
the meaning of a given racial category may vary for men
and women” (Mullings and Schulz 2006, p. 5).


In sum, the construct of intersectionality has assumed a
significant position in thinking about gender. As the
foundation for theory it promised a more accurate and
tractable way of dealing with two issues. First, it promised
a solution, or at least a language for the glaring fact that it is

impossible to talk about gender without considering other
dimensions of social structure/social identity that play a
formative role in gender’s operation and meaning. In the
U.S., the most obvious, pervasive, and seemingly unalterable
are race and social class. Second, intersectionality
seemed a generally applicable descriptive solution to the
multiplying features that create and define social identities.
It is not race-class-gender, but also age, ableness, sexual

orientation, to name the most salient.


In Europe, religion and ethnicity are the most obvious, pervasive and seemingly unalterable social dimensions which play a role in gender's operation and meaning.

The very meaning of Muslim varies for women and men.

Identity is experienced by the individual themself. -> ingroup distancing is a mechanism that Muslim women associate personal meaning to their disadvantaged categories and 

Beyond Subordination vs. Resistance: An Intersectional Approach to the Agency of Veiled Muslim Women

Engaging with a figure that came to operate as a powerful cultural signifier of otherness in debates over migrant/Muslim integration across the West, the ‘veiled woman’; the paper questions the idea of agency that inheres in the contemporary feminist discourses on Muslim veil. After showing the shortcomings and adverse effects of two dominant readings of the Muslim veil, as a symbol of women's subordination to men, or as an act of resistance to Western hegemony, it explores an alternative avenue drawing on both the poststructuralist critique of the humanist subject and feminist intersectional theorising to answer the question of what kind of conception of agency can help us to think about the agency of the veiled woman without binding a priori the meaning of her veiling to the teleology of emancipation, whether feminist or anti-imperialist.

Gender: An Intersectionality Perspective

This paper serves as a “best practices guide” for researchers interested in applying intersectionality theory to psychological research. Intersectionality, the mutually constitutive relations among social identities, presents several issues to researchers interested in applying it to research. I highlight three central issues and provide guidelines for how to address them. First, I discuss the constraints in the number of identities that researchers are able to test in an empirical study, and highlight relevant decision rules. Second, I discuss when to focus on “master” identities (e.g., gender) versus “emergent” identities (i.e., White lesbian). Third, I argue that treating identity as a process situated within social structural contexts facilitates the research process. I end with a brief discussion of the implications for the study of intersectionality.