Most people hold beliefs about personality characteristics typical of members of their own and others' cultures. These perceptions of national character may be generalizations from personal experience, stereotypes with a “kernel of truth,” or inaccurate stereotypes. We obtained national character ratings of 3989 people from 49 cultures and compared them with the average personality scores of culture members assessed by observer ratings and self-reports. National character ratings were reliable but did not converge with assessed traits. Perceptions of national character thus appear to be unfounded stereotypes that may serve the function of maintaining a national identity.

College students (N = 3,435) in 26 cultures reported their perceptions of age-related changes in physical, cognitive, and socioemotional areas of functioning and rated societal views of aging within their culture. There was widespread cross-cultural consensus regarding the expected direction of aging trajectories with (1) perceived declines in societal views of aging, physical attractiveness, the ability to perform everyday tasks, and new learning, (2) perceived increases in wisdom, knowledge, and received respect, and (3) perceived stability in family authority and life satisfaction. Crosscultural variations in aging perceptions were associated with culture-level indicators of population aging, education levels, values, and national character stereotypes. These associations were stronger Löckenhoff et al. Page 3 Psychol Aging. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2010 September 3. NIH-PA Author ManuscriptNIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author Manuscript for societal views on aging and perceptions of socioemotional changes than for perceptions of physical and cognitive changes. A consideration of culture-level variables also suggested that previously reported differences in aging perceptions between Asian and Western countries may be related to differences in population structure. KeywordsAging; stereotypes; cross-cultural; values; national character stereotypes Perceptions of aging influence societal behaviors and expectations towards older people (e.g., Pasupathi & Löckenhoff, 2002) as well as older adults' well-being and coping with the aging process (e.g. Levy, 2003;Levy & Myers, 2004). The majority of studies in this field have focused on individual differences in perceptions of aging within (mostly Western) cultures, but there is growing evidence that views of aging may differ across cultures as well (e.g., Arnhoff, Leon, & Lorge, 1964;Giles et al., 2000). The present study extends previous research by comparing multiple aspects of aging perceptions across 26 cultures and examining their culture-level associates. To provide the background for this work, we review previous research on intercultural differences in perceptions of aging and discuss theoretical perspectives on the causes of such differences.According to social representations theory (Moscovici, 1984(Moscovici, ,1988) the views of aging held within a given culture are a form of shared cultural representation. They constitute systems of ideas, values, and customs related to aging that are treated by members of the society as if they were established reality. Perceptions of aging are multi-dimensional in nature (e.g., Hummert, 1990), encompass both positive and negative characteristics (e.g., Hummert, 1990;McTavish, 1971;Heckhausen, Dixon, & Baltes, 1989), and reflect a mix between accurate depictions of age-related changes and distorted views of older people (Kite, Stockdale, Whitley, & Johnson, 2005). Healthy aging is associated with predictable biological changes (Digiovanna, 2000) that lead to systematic age differences in physical ...

Although large international studies have found consistent patterns of sex differences in personality traits among adults (i.e., women scoring higher on most facets), less is known about cross-cultural sex differences in adolescent personality and the role of culture and age in shaping them. The present study examines NEO Personality Inventory-3 (NEO-PI-3, McCrae, Costa, & Martin, 2005) informant ratings of adolescents from 23 cultures (N = 4,850) and investigates culture and age as sources of variability in sex differences of adolescents’ personality. The effect for Neuroticism (with females scoring higher than males) begins to take on its adult form around age 14. Girls score higher on Openness to Experience and Conscientiousness at all ages between 12 and 17 years. A more complex pattern emerges for Extraversion and Agreeableness, although by age 17, sex differences for these traits are highly similar to those observed in adulthood. Cross-sectional data suggest that (1) with advancing age, sex differences found in adolescents increasingly converge towards adult patterns with respect to both direction and magnitude; (2) girls display sex-typed personality traits at an earlier age than boys; and (3) the emergence of sex differences was similar across culture. Practical implications of the present findings are discussed.

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Abstract-Significant synergy exists between plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) and wind energy: PEVs can be the demand response to mitigate the intermittent wind power outputs, and wind energy can provide low-carbon electricity to PEVs. This paper presents a hierarchical control algorithm to realize this synergy by integrating the PEV charging and wind power scheduling. The control algorithm consists of three levels: the top-level controller optimizes the scheduling for the conventional power plants and wind power; the middle-level controller plans PEV charging to achieve load following based on the battery state of charge and plug-off time of each vehicle; the bottom-level controller uses grid electricity frequency as the feedback cue to control PEV charging and serves as the ancillary service to the grid. Numerical simulations show that the integrated controller can improve the grid frequency regulation and overall electricity generation cost without sacrificing the PEVs charging completion.

The concept of plug-in electric vehicles (PEV) are gaining increasing popularity in recent years, due to the growing societal awareness of reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and gaining independence on foreign oil or petroleum. Largescale deployment of PEVs currently faces many challenges. One particular concern is that the PEV charging can potentially cause significant impacts on the existing power distribution system, due to the increase in peak load. As such, this work tries to mitigate the impacts of PEV charging by proposing a decentralized smart PEV charging algorithm to minimize the distribution system load variance, so that a 'flat' total load profile can be obtained. The charging algorithm is myopic, in that it controls the PEV charging processes in each time slot based entirely on the current power system states, without knowledge about future system dynamics. We provide theoretical guarantees on the asymptotic optimality of the proposed charging algorithm. Thus, compared to other forecast based smart charging approaches in the literature, the charging algorithm not only achieves optimality asymptotically in an on-line, and decentralized manner, but also is robust against various uncertainties in the power system, such as random PEV driving patterns and distributed generation (DG) with highly intermittent renewable energy sources. Index Terms-Distribution systems, smart charging, on-line algorithm, plug-in electric vehicle, minimum load variance, smart grids.Qiao Li (S'07) received the B.Engg. degree from the

We examined properties of culture-level personality traits in ratings of targets (N = 5,109) aged 12 to 17 in 24 cultures. Aggregate scores were generalizable across gender, age, and relationship groups and showed convergence with culture-level scores from previous studies of self-reports and observer ratings of adults, but they were unrelated to national character stereotypes. Trait profiles also showed cross-study agreement within most cultures, eight of which had not previously been studied. Multidimensional scaling showed that Western and non-Western cultures clustered along a dimension related to Extraversion. A culture-level factor analysis replicated earlier findings of a broad Extraversion factor, but generally resembled the factor structure found in individuals. Continued analysis of aggregate personality scores is warranted.The idea that the citizens of different nations have distinctive personalities can be traced to antiquity, and it was a central tenet of early 20th century culture and personality studies (LeVine, 2001). For a number of reasons, including the declining influence of psychoanalysis and ethical concerns about ethnocentrism (see Church, 2001), the topic fell out of favor, and interest has only recently been revived, this time from the perspective of trait psychology (Lynn & Martin, 1995; McCrae, Terracciano, & 79 Members of the Personality Profiles of Cultures Project, 2005;Schmitt et al., 2007). In this new approach, personality profiles of cultures can be obtained by averaging traits assessed in a sample of culture members, yielding a set of aggregate personality traits. This is an etic approach, in which the same set of traits (usually identified in one culture) are studied across a range of cultures.The validity of these culture-level scores must be established, and there are at least two reasons to be skeptical about their accuracy. The first is that the personality trait scales that NIH-PA Author ManuscriptNIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author Manuscript are aggregated may not themselves be commensurable across cultures: They may assess different constructs in different cultural contexts, or they may lack scalar equivalence (Nye, Roberts, Saucier, & Zhou, 2008;van de Vijver & Leung, 1997) because of problems in translation or in the relevance of particular items or to cultural differences in response styles. These are theoretical threats to the validity of all cross-cultural measures.The second reason to doubt the validity of aggregate personality scores is that research to date suggests that they do not correspond to national character stereotypes (Perugini & Richetin, 2007). It is widely believed, for example, that the English are reserved-yet their aggregate personality scores suggest that they are in fact quite extraverted (McCrae, Terracciano, & 79 Members, 2005). This finding is not a fluke; analyses of data from 49 cultures suggested that national stereotypes are almost completely unrelated to aggregate personality traits (Terracciano et al., 2005). Many stereot...