Understanding Cross-Cultural Expectations: Assessing Cultural Similarity Using Affective Meanings

• In Event: 4467 - Section on Social Psychology Refereed Roundtables (Cosponsored with Section on Sociology of Emotions)
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: Table 3: Affective Meaning and Culture

Abstract

Sociologists understand that the meanings of symbols and concepts vary across cultures. These understandings impact the ways actors interact within their culture, but also cross-culturally. Affect control theory has long sought to examine the ways we interact based on the affective meanings we assign concepts like identities and behaviors within a given culture. Recent data collection efforts and advancements in the theory have pushed researchers to consider cross-cultural interactions and differences in meanings. Part of this effort has focused primarily on gaining a better understanding of how we process different events and how these differences in processing impact the ongoing definition of the situation. However, this only presents one side of the issue. What still requires examination are the patterns of dimensional associations that influence the baseline expectations of a culture. These vary cross-culturally but little has been done to understand in what ways or how they influence cross-cultural interaction. Here we take up this problem using ranked order correlations to first examine how actors in 3 separate countries (the U.S., Egypt, and Morocco) define different concepts (like identities, behaviors, and attributes) based on dimensions of affective meaning (evaluation, potency, and activity). We examine the rank orderings of different sentiments based on both dimensions of meaning and types of concepts rated gaining a global perspective on cultural similarities and differences. Then we perform ANOVA analyses to examine differences and similarities in the specific affective meanings associated with different cultural concepts.

Authors

• Jonathan Howard Morgan, Duke University

• Bryan Christopher Cannon, Franklin and Marshall College

• Brent Harrison Curdy, Duke University