Mayra Manzano

The subjective components of happiness and their attainment: a cross-cultural comparison between Italy and Cuba

This study aims to identify the subjective components of happiness and to analyze their degree of attainment in two countries, Italy and Cuba, characterized by very different cultural and socio-economic structures. Two hundred and sixty-five subjects participated in a questionnaire study: 133 from Italy and 132 from Cuba. Respondents were asked to think of happiness and to write down at least 5 components that made them feel happy. A measure of overall happiness was also obtained by asking subjects to rate to what extent they had attained each component in their life. The analysis of responses provided by the two samples yielded the identification of 21 cross-culturally shared happiness components, which referred to individual interests, relational interests and values. The most relevant components in each group were health, family, love and money. Italian and Cuban subjects differed in the frequency of citation of some happiness components (e.g. money, work, partner) and in the degree of attainment of them. Overall, Cubans perceived themselves as happier than Italians. Findings are discussed in relation to the socio-economic and cultural characteristics of the Italian and Cuban contexts.

A lexical database for Spanish-speaking children.

This article presents a computerized database of words for use in experimental research in cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics. The data are based on the oral vocabulary of 200 Spanish-speaking children aged from 11.16 to 49.16 months. The database includes 15,428 Spanish words (tokens) and comprises 1,259 different words (types). It provides information about age of acquisition, orthography, grammar, semantics, and frequency.

Parental Attitudes, Attachment Styles, Social Networks, and Psychological Processes in Autism Spectrum Disorders: A Cross-Cultural Perspective

ABSTRACT In this study the authors used a cross-cultural approach to examine parental attitudes, attachment styles, social networks, and some of the psychological processes involved in Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). Fifty-two children (aged 4–11 years) took part in the study: 30 Italians (15 with ASD and 15 controls) and 22 Cubans (11 with ASD and 11 controls). Findings indicated significant differences between the two cultural groups in terms of the structure of the childrens social network and parental attitudes toward their children. However, the mother–child attachment relationship and cognitive and emotional functioning of the study participants were independent of culture.

Emotions and Everyday Life in Cuba

Investigates the quality of everyday emotional experience in Cuba, a cultural context profoundly different from those previously analysed. A questionnaire was completed by 153 students of Havana University (age 17–28 years). They were asked to report an emotion-eliciting episode that had happened to them and to answer some questions concerning the content of the episode, i.e., antecedent, contextual aspects, cognitive evaluations, reactions, and social sharing of the emotion. The results indicated that positive emotions accounted for about 50% of everyday emotional experience and were significantly associated with high intensity. The antecedents most frequently cited were of a relational type and involved family, partner, and friends. The results are discussed in the light of previous studies on emotion antecedents conducted in Europe and in the US. It is argued that the Cuban cultural context presents some interesting peculiarities, which may influence the presence of specific typologies of emotion and the quality of subjective everyday experience.

Estudio de la familiaridad de un conjunto de figuras en niños

ResumenUn grupo de 60 ninos de habla hispana evaluo la familiaridad de 257 figuras, tomadas del conjunto propuesto por Snodgrass y Vanderwart (1980). La pertenencia categorial y la tipicidad de las figuras fue determinada a partir del trabajo de Pineiro et al. (en prensa). Cuando se examino la relacion entre la familiaridad y la tipicidad, las correlaciones obtenidas no fueron significativas. Solo para dos categorias: aves y frutas se encontraron correlaciones significativas entre la familiaridad y la tipicidad. Lo anterior sugiere que la familiaridad y la tipicidad son indices independientes. Ademas los valores de la familiaridad obtenids en este estudio fueron comparados con los reportados en un grupo de ninos de habla inglesa (Berman et al., 1989), y para un grupo de adultos de habla hispana (Manzano et al., 1997). Se encontraron diferencias de tipo cultural en la primera comparacion (grupos de ninos). Las diferencias fueron menores cuando se compararon los juicios de familiaridad de los ninos de habla...