Most adults and children in cultures where reading text progresses from left to right also count objects from the left to the right side of space. The reverse is found in cultures with a right-to-left reading direction. The current set of experiments investigated whether vertical counting in the horizontal plane is also influenced by reading direction. Participants were either from a left-to-ri...

Three studies investigated whether apologies and/or thanks in a favor asking email message increase normality of the message, positive attitude about the message, sender credibility and willingness to give the favor in the U.S. and Korea. Participants as the Sender in study 1 (N = 521) and as the Receiver in study 2 (N = 386) completed one of four versions of a questionnaire regarding a prototy...

spirituality is one of the dimensions of human health. religious spiritual characteristics including forgiveness, hope, transcendence, immanent and sense of integration to surroundings can cause better adjustment and more health and welfare in the life. there is a near relationship between culture and psychology. the aim of the present research was to study cross-cultural aspects of religious s...

Social smiling is universally regarded as being an infant's first facial expression of pleasure. Underlying co-constructivist emotion theories are the assumptions that the emergence of social smiling is bound to experiences of face-to-face interactions with caregivers and the impact of two developmental mechanisms--maternal and infant imitation. We analyzed mother-infant interactions from two d...

Address behavior is governed by politeness phenomenon which is culturally bound. This paper attempts to draw a cross-cultural comparison between Chinese and English address forms and, going beneath the surface, explore the cultural differences in value systems and their underlying philosophical sources. The study will help people develop a fuller understanding of the meanings of the address ter...

Various researchers (i.e., Singelis, Triandis, Bhawuk, & Gelfand,1995; Triandis & Gelfand, 1998) have suggested that the cultural variables of horizontal and vertical individualism and collectivism correspond to Fiske’s (1991, 1992) relational models of collectivism, authority ranking, equality matching, and market pricing. In this study, we tested this claim in a cross-cultural comparison betw...

To what extent is prosody shaped by cultural and social factors? Existing research has shown that an individual bilingual speaker exhibits differences in framing, ideology, and personality when speaking their two languages. To understand whether these differences extend to prosody we study F0 variation in a corpus of interviews with German-Italian and German-French bilingual speakers. We find t...

Interlanguage pragmatics, as an inseparable part of communicative competence, has been emphasized as an ultimate objective in language learning. This study explored the perceptions of Iranian English as a foreign language (EFL) students regarding interlanguage pragmatics and the impact of textbooks tasks on shaping their pragmatic competence. To accomplish this objective, 137 senior EFL student...