Copyright and reuse:Sussex Research Online is a digital repository of the research output of the University.Copyright and all moral rights to the version of the paper presented here belong to the individual author(s) and/or other copyright owners. To the extent reasonable and practicable, the material made available in SRO has been checked for eligibility before being made available.Copies of full text items generally can be reproduced, displayed or performed and given to third parties in any format or medium for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-profit purposes without prior permission or charge, provided that the authors, title and full bibliographic details are credited, a hyperlink and/or URL is given for the original metadata page and the content is not changed in any way.Article accepted for publication in Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/xge0000175 © American Psychological Association (APA) This article may not exactly replicate the authoritative document published in the APA journal. It is not the copy of record. contrast between independence and interdependence does not adequately capture the diverse models of selfhood that prevail in different world regions. Cultural groups emphasize different ways of being both independent and interdependent, depending on individualism-collectivism, national socioeconomic development, and religious heritage. Our seven-dimensional model will allow future researchers to test more accurately the implications of cultural models of selfhood for psychological processes in diverse ecocultural contexts.Keywords: CULTURE; SELF-CONSTRUALS; INDEPENDENCE-INTERDEPENDENCE Twenty-five years ago, Markus and Kitayama (1991) published their classic article on culture and the self, proposing that people in different parts of the world tend to construe themselves in two fundamentally different ways. They argued that Western cultures are unusual in promoting an independent view of the self as bounded, unitary, stable, and separate from the social context, whereas cultures in other parts of the world emphasize an interdependent view of the self as closely connected to others, fluid, and contextually embedded. They proposed that people with independent self-construals would strive for self-expression, uniqueness, and self-actualization, basing their actions on personal thoughts, feelings, and goals. In contrast, people with interdependent self-construals would strive to fit in and maintain social harmony, basing their actions on situationally defined norms and expectations.Markus and Kitayama's (1991) proposals had a dramatic impact on social, personality and developmental psychology, challenging ethnocentric assumptions, drawing attention to cultural diversity, and providing conceptual tools for theorizing about it. Social and personality psychologists used measures and manipulations of self-construals to predict numerous outcomes: cognitive styles, well-being, self-regulation, selfesteem, communication styles, social anxiety, and pro...

Beliefs about personhood are understood to be a defining feature of individualism-collectivism (I-C), but they have been insufficiently explored, given the emphasis of research on values and self-construals. We propose the construct of contextualism, referring to beliefs about the importance of context in understanding people, as a facet of cultural collectivism. A brief measure was developed and refined across 19 nations (Study 1: N = 5,241), showing good psychometric properties for cross-cultural use and correlating well at the nation level with other supposed facets and indicators of I-C. In Study 2 (N = 8,652), nation-level contextualism predicted ingroup favoritism, corruption, and differential trust of ingroup and outgroup members, while controlling for other facets of I-C, across 35 nations. We conclude that contextualism is an important part of cultural collectivism. This highlights the importance of beliefs alongside values and selfrepresentations and contributes to a wider understanding of cultural processes.

Despite its theoretical and clinical interest, there are no experimental studies exploring obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD)-like disgust sensations through using somatosensory illusions. Such illusions provide important clues to the nature and limits of multisensory integration and how the brain constructs body image; and may potentially inform novel therapies. One such effect is the rubber hand illusion (RHI) in which tactile sensations are referred to a rubber hand; if the experimenter simultaneously strokes a subject’s occluded hand together with a visible fake hand, the subject starts experiencing the touch sensations as arising from the dummy. In this study, we explore whether OCD-like disgust may result from contamination of a dummy hand during the RHI; suggesting a possible integration of somatosensory and limbic inputs in the construction of body image. We predicted that participants would experience sensations of disgust, when placing a disgust stimulus (fake feces, vomit or blood) on the dummy hand after establishing the RHI. We found that 9 out of 11 participants experienced greater disgust during the synchronous condition (real hidden hand and fake hand are stroked in synchrony) compared to the asynchronous control condition (real hidden hand and fake hand are stroked in asynchrony); and on average such disgust was significantly greater during the synchronous condition compared to the asynchronous control condition, Z = 2.7, p = .008. These results argue against a strictly hierarchical modular approach to brain function and suggest that a four-way multisensory interaction occurs between vision, touch, proprioception on the one hand and primal emotions like disgust on the other. These findings may inform novel clinical approaches for OCD; that is, contaminating a dummy during the RHI could possibly be used as part of an in-vivo exposure-intervention for OCD.

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In the current research we report data from two studies that examined rates and characteristics of sleep paralysis (SP) in the general population of Denmark and Egypt. In Study I, individuals from Denmark and Egypt did not differ in age whereas there were more males in the Egyptian sample (47 vs. 64 %); in Study II, individuals from Denmark and Egypt were comparable in terms of age and gender distribution. In Study I we found that significantly fewer individuals had experienced SP in Denmark [25 % (56/223)] than in Egypt [44 % (207/470)] p < .001. In Study II we found that individuals who had experienced at least one lifetime episode of SP from Denmark (n = 58) as compared to those from Egypt (n = 143) reported significantly fewer SP episodes in a lifetime relative to SP experiencers from Egypt (M = 6.0 vs. M = 19.4, p < .001). SP in the Egyptian sample was characterized by high rates of SP (as compared to in Denmark), frequent occurrences (three times that in the Denmark sample), prolonged immobility during SP, and great fear of dying from the experience. In addition, in Egypt, believing SP to be precipitated by the supernatural was associated with fear of the experience and longer SP immobility. Findings are discussed in the context of cultural elaboration and salience theories of SP.