Vivian Dzokoto

Culture, personality, and subjective well-being: integrating process models of life satisfaction.

The authors examined the interplay of personality and cultural factors in the prediction of the affective (hedonic balance) and the cognitive (life satisfaction) components of subjective well-being (SWB). They predicted that the influence of personality on life satisfaction is mediated by hedonic balance and that the relation between hedonic balance and life satisfaction is moderated by culture. As a consequence, they predicted that the influence of personality on life satisfaction is also moderated by culture. Participants from 2 individualistic cultures (United States, Germany) and 3 collectivistic cultures (Japan, Mexico, Ghana) completed measures of Extraversion, Neuroticism, hedonic balance, and life satisfaction. As predicted, Extraversion and Neuroticism influenced hedonic balance to the same degree in all cultures, and hedonic balance was a stronger predictor of life satisfaction in individualistic than in collectivistic cultures. The influence of Extraversion and Neuroticism on life satisfaction was largely mediated by hedonic balance. The results suggest that the influence of personality on the emotional component of SWB is pancultural, whereas the influence of personality on the cognitive component of SWB is moderated by culture.

Positivity and the Construction of Life Satisfaction Judgments: Global Happiness Is Not the Sum of Its Parts

The present study investigated how reports of satisfaction with specific versus global domains can be used to assess a disposition towards positivity in subjective well-being reports. College students from 41 societies (N = 7167) completed measures of life satisfaction and ratings of global and specific aspects of their lives. For example, participants rated satisfaction with their education (global) and satisfaction with their professors, textbooks, and lectures (specific). It was hypothesized that global measures would more strongly reflect individual differences in dispositional positivity, that is, a propensity to evaluate aspects of life in general as good. At both the individual and national levels, positivity predicted life satisfaction beyond objective measures. Also, positivity was associated with norms about ideal life satisfaction such that countries and individuals who highly valued positive emotions were more likely to display positivity. The difference between more global versus more concrete measures of satisfaction can be used as an indirect and subtle measure of positivity.

Self and Identity in African Studies

Rather than a comprehensive review of self and identity in particular settings, this article considers implications of research in African Studies for the psychological science of self and identity. The first section considers implications of research about enemies for the concept of interdependent selfways (Markus, Mullally, & Kitayama, 1997). In contrast to the positive connotations typical of studies about culture and self, this research directs attention to the dark side of interdependence. The second section considers implications of research about identity for the concept of dynamic construction (Hong, Ip, Chiu, Morris, & Menon, 2001). In contrast to the tendency to regard cultural identities as natural entities, research in African Studies directs attention to the active reproduction of cultural identity in everyday lives.

Desired emotions across cultures: A value-based account

Values reflect how people want to experience the world; emotions reflect how people actually experience the world. Therefore, we propose that across cultures people desire emotions that are consistent with their values. Whereas prior research focused on the desirability of specific affective states or 1 or 2 target emotions, we offer a broader account of desired emotions. After reporting initial evidence for the potential causal effects of values on desired emotions in a preliminary study (N = 200), we tested the predictions of our proposed model in 8 samples (N = 2,328) from distinct world cultural regions. Across cultural samples, we found that people who endorsed values of self-transcendence (e.g., benevolence) wanted to feel more empathy and compassion, people who endorsed values of self-enhancement (e.g., power) wanted to feel more anger and pride, people who endorsed values of openness to change (e.g., self-direction) wanted to feel more interest and excitement, and people who endorsed values of conservation (e.g., tradition) wanted to feel more calmness and less fear. These patterns were independent of differences in emotional experience. We discuss the implications of our value-based account of desired emotions for understanding emotion regulation, culture, and other individual differences. (PsycINFO Database Record

Happiness in the Eye and the Heart: Somatic Referencing in West African Emotion Lexica:

Although many theories about the structure of emotion have been developed, none of them seem to adequately explain the African experience. This study examined the folk emotion lexica of two indigenous West African languages. Fifty monolingual Fante speakers and 50 monolingual Dagbani speakers from rural and semirural Ghana participated in focus groups to generate words in their native language that they use to describe experiences that involve emotions. Qualitative analysis of the emotion lexica generated by the focus group participants revealed frequent somatic referencing in the emotion talk of Fante and Dagbani, although there were differences in the specific body parts mentioned in references to various emotional experiences. The ubiquity of somatic referents in the expression of African emotions suggests that future theories of emotion structure may need to incorporate the concept of embodiment.

Analyzing Ghanaian Emotions Through Narrative: A Textual Analysis of Ama Ata Aidoo’s Novel Changes

Contemporary African emotional expression is a cultural artifact that has encoded within it the story of colonial and postcolonial history. Through an analysis of Ama Ata Aidoo’s award-winning novel Changes, this article explores how emotions are expressed in contemporary Ghanaian literature. From literal translations of indigenous languages and culturally specific nonverbal communication to Western expressions and locally created neologisms, the contemporary Ghanaian text Changes offers a glimpse into the unique world of Ghanaian emotions—a world that is an interesting mix of the indigenous, Westernization, and time.

Genital-Shrinking Panic in Ghana: A Cultural Psychological Analysis

The present article applies the theoretical framework of mutual constitution (MC)—the dialectical process by which ‘culture and psyche make each other up’—to analyze an occurrence of genital-shrinking panic (GSP). Although media reports promote interpretation of this event in terms of ignorance and superstition, the MC framework affords a less pathologizing analysis. The first part of this analysis, one that resonates with classic ethnographic perspectives, emphasizes the cultural grounding of psychological experience: how episodes of GSP make sense given local constructions of reality. However, an adequate analysis requires attention not only to cultural realities in which incidents of GSP make sense, but also to the role of psychological activity in reproducing, maintaining and extending those realities. Accordingly, the second part of this analysis emphasizes the less articulated, dynamic-construction side of the MC framework: the role of psychological activity in the reproduction of cultural worlds.

Disgust and contamination: a cross-national comparison of ghana and the United States.

The emotion of disgust, with feelings of revulsion and behavioral withdrawal, make it a prime emotion to aid in the avoidance of sources of contamination, including sources of potential infectious disease. We tested the theory that living in a region with a historically high prevalence of infectious diseases would promote higher levels of disgust and contamination sensitivity as a protective measure. A sample of undergraduates from Ghana (n = 103, 57 women), a country with a historically high prevalence of infectious diseases, showed significantly higher scores on scales assessing disgust, contamination, and disease susceptibility than a sample of undergraduates from the United States (n = 96, 58 women), a country with lower levels of disease threat. Contamination sensitivity mediated the national differences in disgust. Disgust connoting contamination also produced larger cross-national effect sizes than other types of disgust. Finally, a factor analysis on the Ghanaian responses to one of the disgust scales did not resemble the usual three-factor solution found in West. Taken together, the results were consistent with the hypothesis that a region with a higher prevalence of infectious disease threats would produce greater sensitivity to disgust and contamination than seen in lower disease threat regions. This first study on disgust in Africa showed that disgust sensitivity could differ considerably from that in the West.

Attention to emotion and non-Western faces: revisiting the facial feedback hypothesis.

ABSTRACT In a modified replication of Strack, Martin, and Steppers demonstration of the Facial Feedback Hypothesis (1988), we investigated the effect of attention to emotion on the facial feedback process in a non-western cultural setting. Participants, recruited from two universities in Ghana, West Africa, gave self-reports of their perceived levels of attention to emotion, and then completed cartoon-rating tasks while randomly assigned to smiling, frowning, or neutral conditions. While participants with low Attention to Emotion scores displayed the usual facial feedback effect (rating cartoons as funnier when in the smiling compared to the frowning condition), the effect was not present in individuals with high Attention to Emotion. The findings indicate that (1) the facial feedback process can occur in contexts beyond those in which the phenomenon has previously been studied, and (2) aspects of emotion regulation, such as Attention to Emotion can interfere with the facial feedback process.

A Bird, a Crocodile, and the 21st Century Cowrie Shell: Analyzing Ghana’s Currency Change

Ghana’s currency was redenominated in 2007. The current study explored this transition as an example of change occurring in a cultural context. This was achieved using interviews as a window into the experiences of a sample of 40 Ghanaians who daily live in the aftermath of this change. These findings indicate that the old currency continues to play a very important role in post-redenomination Ghana. Though no longer physically present, the old currency remains an integral part of the daily financial discourse. While participants gave several reasons for this tendency, the “Sankofa—Denkyem” (retrospective adaptability) effect is introduced as a cultural framework that adequately explains the results of this study.