Cultural Asymmetry Between Perceptions of Past and Future Personal Change.

Research has shown that Westerners expect less change to occur in the future than they recall having occurred in the past. The present research investigated how recalled change and anticipated change may vary across cultures. Because Chinese perceive past times as being closer to the present than do Westerners, and people believe things tend to change more over a long period of time than over a short period of time, Chinese may perceive smaller changes from the past to the present than do Westerners.

Gain +1 or Avoid -1: Validation of the German Regulatory Focus Questionnaire (RFQ).

Background: The Regulatory Focus Questionnaire (RFQ) assesses regulatory promotion and prevention focus, which represent orientations towards gains or losses. The main objective of this study was to examine the psychometric properties of the newly translated German version.

Methods: A sample of 1024 participants answered the questionnaire and several related instruments.

Psychometric Properties of the German Version of the Health Regulatory Focus Scale.

The Health Regulatory Focus Scale (HRFS) is a short scale which measures an individual's prevention and promotion focus in a health-specific context. The main objective of this study was to examine the psychometric properties of the newly translated German version of the HRFS. Reliability and item characteristics were found to be satisfactory.

Regulatory focus affects predictions of the future.

This research investigated how regulatory focus might influence trend-reversal predictions. We hypothesized that compared with promotion focus, prevention focus hinders sense of control, which in turn predicts more trend-reversal developments. Studies 1 and 3 revealed that participants expected trend-reversal developments to be more likely to occur when they focused on prevention than when they focused on promotion.

Culture, temporal focus, and values of the past and the future.

This article examines cultural differences in how people value future and past events. Throughout four studies, the authors found that European Canadians attached more monetary value to an event in the future than to an identical event in the past, whereas Chinese and Chinese Canadians placed more monetary value to a past event than to an identical future event. The authors also showed that temporal focus-thinking about the past or future-explained cultural influences on the temporal value asymmetry effect.

Cultural differences in the representativeness heuristic: expecting a correspondence in magnitude between cause and effect.

Based on previous research on cultural differences in analytic and holistic reasoning, it was hypothesized in these studies that when explaining events, North Americans would be more likely than East Asians to expect causes to correspond in magnitude with those events (i.e., big events stem from big causes and small events stem from small causes).