BACKGROUND There is considerable debate about the cross-cultural applicability of the posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) category as currently specified. Concerns include the possible status of PTSD as a Western culture-bound disorder and the validity of individual items and criteria thresholds. This review examines various types of cross-cultural validity of the PTSD criteria as defined in D...

The use of pictograms is discussed considering their information content, graphic complexity and cultural dimension. The resemblance and the illusion theories are highlighted to define pictogram as a salience-based representation system, which communicational efficacy depends upon historical and cultural aspects in their interpretation. Thus, the competence in interpreting pictograms is conside...

Following a mortality salience or control prime, Black, Hispanic, and White college students read a murder/carjacking or auto theft trial transcript in which the defendant belonged to their racial/ethnic group or one of the others. Black and Hispanic, but not White, mock-jurors discriminated, more frequently judging outgroup defendants guilty. Mortality salience affected judgments about outgrou...

Terror management theory assumes that death arouses existential anxiety in humans which is suppressed in focal attention. Whereas most studies provide indirect evidence for negative affect under mortality salience by showing cultural worldview defenses and self-esteem strivings, there is only little direct evidence for implicit negative affect under mortality salience. In the present study, we ...

Throughout human history, food consumption has been deeply tied to cultural groups. Past models of food preference have assumed that social concerns are dissociated from basic appetitive qualities—such as tastiness—in food choice. Providing a counter to this notion, we tested and found support for the novel idea that social identities can shape the evaluation of food pleasantness. Specifically,...

Individuals who have been subtly reminded of death display heightened in-group favouritism, or “worldview defense.” Terror management theory argues (i) that death cues engender worldview defense via psychological mechanisms specifically evolved to suppress death anxiety, and (ii) that the core function of religiosity is to suppress death anxiety. Thus, terror management theory predicts that ext...

This study focused on the effect of two factors of complexity and salience and the mixture of both on listening comprehension. Advanced learners were divided into four separate groups (complex-salience-mixture-control) and each group was tested by different listening tests. Each group received a pre-test, 10 sessions of during-test instructions and a final post-test. The results showed that the...

Asian-American women's performance on a test of quantitative skill was studied as a function of whether their Asian, female, or individual identity was salient at the time of testing. In previous research, ethnicity salience was found to result in enhanced math performance among Asian women. However, the investigators relied on a subtle manipulation of ethnicity salience that likely did not inv...

one of the main agreements among classical and contemporary sociologists is putting emphasis on the role and place of utilizing forms of capital in reconsidering identity limits and expansion of collective belongings. this article is based on conceptual framework (jenekins and bourdieu) and tries to study empirically the theory of the relationship between the amount of economic capital as well ...

Research in the area of spatial cognition demonstrated that references to landmarks are essential in the communication and the interpretation of wayfinding instructions for human being. In order to detect landmarks, a model for the assessment of their salience has been previously developed by Raubal and Winter. According to their model, landmark salience is divided into three categories: visual...