The cultural life script of Qatar and across cultures: effects of gender and religion.

Cultural life scripts (CLS) are culturally shared cognitive representations of the expected order and timing of important life events in a prototypical life. Through three studies data from Qatar were analysed and compared to previously collected data from Denmark, Turkey, and the US. In Study 1 we examined the CLS of Qatar in order to determine whether the clear segregation of men and women as well as the centrality of religion in this society would influence the CLS. A total of 55 Qatari undergraduates completed the standard CLS task, imaging a Qatari infant of their own as well as the opposite gender. In Study 2 important personal life story events were collected from 83 Qatari undergraduates in order to explore the overlap between remembered life events and CLS events. Study 3 was a reanalysis of CLS data from Denmark, Turkey, and the US. There was a considerable overlap of events across cultures, but we also found that the Qatari CLS showed more gender differences and contained more religious and positive events compared to the other three countries.