Peng and Nisbett (1999) claimed that members of Asian cultures show a greater preference than Euro-Americans for proverbs expressing paradox (so-called dialectical proverbs; e.g., Too humble is half proud). The present research sought to replicate this claim with the same set of stimuli used in Peng and Nisbett's Experiment 2 and a new set of dialectical and nondialectical proverbs that were sc...

Social scientists strongly believe that cultural norms and values shape, stimulate, direct, and influence all activities of human societies. This study attempts to provide a sociological analysis of cultural components, in particular the content of the proverbs included in Dehkhoda's Amsal va Hekam (Proverbs and Parables) and their role in Iran's underdevelopment. This book was chosen ...

Proverbs were used to examine whether laypeople's conceptions of or preferences for life-management strategies are consistent with the model of selection, optimization, and compensation (SOC model). The SOC model posits that there are three fundamental processes of life management: selection, optimization, and compensation. In two studies (N = 64; N = 131), young (19-32 years) and older adults ...

Comparison and reminding have both been shown to support learning and transfer. Comparison is thought to support transfer because it allows learners to disregard non-matching features of superficially different episodes in order to abstract the essential structure of concepts. Remindings promote memory for the individual episodes and generalization because they prompt learners to retrieve earli...

Two studies attempted to discriminate between a situationaleconomic and a cultural explanation for the recently reported finding that Chinese from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) are more risk-seeking than Americans. Both studies compared American and Chinese proverbs related to risk and risk-taking. The first study added Germany as a control group for its socioeconomic similarity to the U...

This paper describes a methodology for automatically identifying proverbs and their variants in running texts. This methodology is based on existing compilations of proverbs, by exploring the regular syntactic structures that most proverbs present and intersecting syntactic structure with the lexical units of the proverbs. From the syntactic regularities we divided the data into 13 different cl...

In this paper I examine the role of generic cognitive mechanisms in language structure and use through an analysis of proverbs related to dogs in English and Spanish. I give an outline of proverb cognition based on universal principles, which constitutes an alternative view to that of Lakoff & Turner (1989), and is in line of Ruiz de Mendoza (1999b: 54), who puts forward a more economic and mot...

proverbs mirror the culture of nations and because of their prevalence in everyday language, a cross cultural study of these metaphorical expresson is inevitable since without knowing the culture and proverbs of the target language, understanding that language will be difficult. the aim this article is to present the origin of persian proverbs and to compare them with german proverbs. for this ...

For Condor web site. Many proverbs seem to convey wisdom because they help people reframe and adjust to life’s predicaments. Positive reframes, such as Every cloud has a silver lining, often draw positive implications from adverse circumstances (cf., “gain frames,” “positive reappraisals,” “emotion-focused coping”, “dispositional optimism”). In contrast, negative reframes, such as All that glit...