scholarly journals Cross-Cultural Comparisons of the Cute and Related Concepts in Japan, the United States, and Israel

SAGE Open ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 215824402098873
Author(s):  
Hiroshi Nittono ◽  
Shiri Lieber-Milo ◽  
Joshua P. Dale

An online survey was conducted to clarify the connotative meanings of the cute and the attitudes toward cuteness in three countries: Japan ( n = 1,000), the United States ( n = 718), and Israel ( n = 437). The results show a remarkable resemblance in respondents’ conceptions of the cute ( kawaii in Japanese and hamud in Hebrew) across countries. Except for slight cultural differences, the following common tendencies were found: (a) Cuteness is highly appreciated and believed to induce positive affective responses, (b) women tend to find things cute more frequently and strongly than men do, (c) animal babies are thought to be cuter than human babies, and (d) infants are found to be cuter when people get older, while older people generally show less positive attitudes toward cuteness. This study provides some evidence that the concept of cuteness and the feelings connected to its perception are universal.

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hiroshi Nittono ◽  
Shiri Lieber Milo ◽  
Joshua Dale

<p>An online survey was conducted to clarify the semantic image of the cute and attitudes toward cuteness in three countries: Japan, the United States, and Israel (total <i>N</i> = 2,155). The results show a remarkable resemblance in respondents’ conceptions of the cute (<i>kawaii</i> in Japanese and <i>hamud</i> in Hebrew) across countries. Several common tendencies were found: (1) Cuteness is highly appreciated and believed to induce positive affective responses, (2) women tend to find things cute more frequently and strongly than men do, (3) animal babies are thought to be cuter than human babies, and (4) infants are found to be cuter when people get older, while older people generally show less positive attitudes toward cuteness. This study demonstrates that the concept of cuteness and the feelings connected to its perception are universal.</p>


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hiroshi Nittono ◽  
Shiri Lieber Milo ◽  
Joshua Dale

<p>An online survey was conducted to clarify the semantic image of the cute and attitudes toward cuteness in three countries: Japan, the United States, and Israel (total <i>N</i> = 2,155). The results show a remarkable resemblance in respondents’ conceptions of the cute (<i>kawaii</i> in Japanese and <i>hamud</i> in Hebrew) across countries. Several common tendencies were found: (1) Cuteness is highly appreciated and believed to induce positive affective responses, (2) women tend to find things cute more frequently and strongly than men do, (3) animal babies are thought to be cuter than human babies, and (4) infants are found to be cuter when people get older, while older people generally show less positive attitudes toward cuteness. This study demonstrates that the concept of cuteness and the feelings connected to its perception are universal.</p>


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Sznycer ◽  
Aaron Lukaszewski

Social emotions are hypothesized to be adaptations designed by selection to solve adaptiveproblems pertaining to social valuation—the disposition to attend to, associate with, and aid atarget individual based on her probable contributions to the fitness of the valuer. To steerbetween effectiveness and economy, social emotions need to activate in precise proportion to the local evaluations of the various acts and characteristics that dictate the social value of self and others. Supporting this hypothesis, experiments conducted in the United States and India indicate that five different social emotions all track a common set of valuations. The extent to which people value each of 25 positive characteristics in others predicts the intensities of: pride (if you had those characteristics), anger (if someone failed to acknowledge that you have thosecharacteristics), gratitude (if someone convinced others that you have those characteristics), guilt (if you harmed someone who has those characteristics), and sadness (if someone died who had those characteristics). The five emotions track local valuations (mean r = +.72) and even foreign valuations (mean r = +.70). In addition, cultural differences in emotion are patterned: They follow cultural differences in valuation. These findings suggest that multiple social emotions are governed (in part) by a common architecture of social valuation, that the valuation architecture operates with a substantial degree of universality in its content, and that a unified theoretical framework may explain cross-cultural invariances and cultural differences in emotion.


Autism ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (8) ◽  
pp. 1993-2006 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristen Gillespie-Lynch ◽  
Nidal Daou ◽  
Maria-Jose Sanchez-Ruiz ◽  
Steven K Kapp ◽  
Rita Obeid ◽  
...  

Although stigma negatively impacts autistic people globally, the degree of stigma varies across cultures. Prior research suggests that stigma may be higher in cultures with more collectivistic orientations. This study aimed to identify cultural values and other individual differences that contribute to cross-cultural differences in autism stigma (assessed with a social distance scale) between college students in Lebanon ( n = 556) and those in the United States ( n = 520). Replicating prior work, stigma was lower in women than men and in the United States relative to Lebanon. Heightened autism knowledge, quality of contact with autistic people, openness to experience, and reduced acceptance of inequality predicted lower stigma. Collectivism was not associated with heightened stigma. Findings highlight the need to address structural inequalities, combat harmful misconceptions, and foster positive contact to combat stigma.


2010 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-19 ◽  
Author(s):  
DOH CHULL SHIN

AbstractHow do contemporary publics understand happiness? What makes them experience it? Do conceptions and sources of their happiness vary across culturally different societies? This paper addresses these questions, utilizing the 2008 round of the AsiaBarometer surveys conducted in six countries scattered over four different continents. Analyses of these surveys, conducted in Japan, China, and India from the East; and the United States, Russia, and Australia from the West, reveal a number of interesting cross-cultural differences and similarities in the way the people of the East and West understand and experience happiness. Specifically, the former are much less multidimensional than the latter in their conceptions of happiness. Yet, they are alike in that their sense of relative achievement or deprivation is the most pervasive and powerful influence on happiness.


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