 32. Culture and Personality  693
believed in dispositions (“How people be -
have is mostly determined by their personal -
ity”) more strongly than Americans and Fili -
pinos, who in turn believed in dispositions 
more strongly than did Japanese. Similarly, 
Owe et al. (2013) developed the contextual -
ism scale that captures a very similar aspect 
of person perception (“To understand a per -
son well, it is essential to know about his or 
her family”) and showed that people living 
in collectivist nations endorse contextualism 
more than do those in individualist nations. 
Furthermore, contextualism was associated 
with ingroup favoritism and differentiated 
trust (relative trust of ingroup over outgroup 
members).
Self
Since Markus and Kitayama’s (1991) semi -
nal work on independent and interdepen -
dent self-  construals, various modifications 
have been suggested. Most recently, Vignoles 
et al. (2016) extended the two-  dimension 
model to seven dimensions of the self: differ -
ence versus similarity, self-  containment ver -
sus connection to others, self-  direction ver -
sus receptiveness to influence, self-  reliance 
versus dependence on others, consistency 
versus variability, self-  expression versus 
harmony, and self-  interest versus commit -
ment to others. This study, which examined 
these dimensions in 55 cultural groups in 33 
nations, yielded patterns of global variation 
that support some of Markus and Kitayama’s 
(1991) predictions, yet the emerging picture 
is more complex. Cultures differ in the ways 
they emphasize being both independent and 
interdependent, and these differences are 
related to individualism–  collectivism, socio -
economic development, and religion.
Likewise, since Suh’s (2002) seminal work 
on culture and consistency of the self, there 
have been several new developments. First, 
Church et al. (2008) replicated the original 
findings among Japanese but not among 
other collectivist nations such as Malaysia, 
Mexico, and the Philippines. Second, more 
recent research showed that consistency is 
more directly associated with subjective au -
thenticity and relationship quality among 
European Americans than among East 
Asians (English & Chen, 2011), suggest -
ing that Suh’s original finding (consistency 
is more directly associated with subjective well-being among European Americans than 
among East Asians) could be explained in 
part by authenticity and relationship quality.
Recent cross-  cultural research exploring 
the conceptual basis of self-  concepts found 
that the distinctiveness motive is also pres -
ent among collectivist nations (i.e., distinc -
tive self-  descriptors were rated more central 
to the self-  definition than less distinctive 
self- descriptions), but that distinctiveness 
was more closely associated with difference 
and separation among respondents from 
individualistic nations than those from col -
lectivist nations (Becker et al., 2012). Simi -
larly, a recent cross-  cultural study showed 
that although self-  esteem is predicted from 
control, duty, altruism, and status, cultural 
norms with regard to each aspect moder -
ated this relation, such that in nations high 
in self-  transcendence (universalism, benevo -
lence), people’s self-  esteem was more strong -
ly associated with benefiting others than in 
nations low in self-  transcendence (Becker et 
al., 2014).
Emotion
Like research on traits, culture and emotion 
research also has expanded the scope of in -
vestigation beyond the traditional East ver -
sus West. Particularly noteworthy is a great -
er concern for linguistic aspects of emotion 
(cf. lexical approach in traits). For instance, 
Dzokoto and Okazaki (2006) explored Fan -
te’s (Ghana) emotion terms and found that 
most emotion words are literally referring to 
body (e.g., envy = Ahowoyaw, which means 
skin-pain; anger = Ebufo, which means chest-
grow; anxiety = Ayemhyehye, which means 
stomach-  burn). Not surprisingly, then, Gha -
naians are more likely to somatize emotional 
experiences than are European Americans 
(Dzokoto, 2010), yet Ghanaians were less 
accurate about physiological changes than 
European Americans (Chentsova-  Dutton 
& Dzokoto, 2014). To this end, it is inter -
esting that East Asians, who are thought to 
somatize more than European Americans 
(Tsai, Simeonova, & Watanabe, 2004), also 
showed less accuracy in identifying physi -
ological cues (Ma-  Kellams, Blascovich, & 
McCall, 2012).
Along with somatization of emotion, 
it has been long recognized that there is a 
large degree of cultural variation in emotion 