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A total of 467 mothers of firstborn 20-month-old children from 7 countries (103 Argentine, 61 Belgian, 39 Israeli, 78 Italian, 57 Japanese, 69 Korean, and 60 US American) completed the Jackson Personality Inventory (JPI), measures of parenting cognitions (self-perceptions and knowledge), and a social desirability scale. Our first analysis showed that the Five-Factor structure of personality (Openness, Neuroticism, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness) could be extracted from the JPI scales when cross-cultural data from mothers in the 7 countries were analyzed; it was also replicable and generalizable in mothers from so-called individualist and collectivist cultures. Our second analysis showed that the five personality factors relate differently to diverse parenting cognitions in those individualist versus collectivist cultures. Maternal personality has significance in studies of normative parenting, child development, and family process across cultural contexts.

Most infant social referencing studies have assumed that infants would be more likely to engage in social looking and be influenced by adults' message when a context is ambiguous. The present study empirically tested the effect of stimulus ambiguity on infants' referencing behaviours, with three different stimuli (positive, ambiguous, and negative), two different messages (happy and fearful), two different message providers (mother and stranger), and in two age groups (12 and 16 month olds). A typical social referencing paradigm was used and infants' social looking and regulation were measured. Infants looked at adults more frequently and faster during ambiguous situations than during unambiguous situations. They also tended to regulate their affect and behaviour based on adults' message only towards ambiguous toys. Older infants tended to look at adults faster, and showed stronger reactions towards ambiguous stimuli than younger infants, suggesting that infants' social development may moderate the effect of stimulus ambiguity on social referencing. Overall, results indicated that the ambiguity postulate is a legitimate assumption for infant social referencing.

Responding to international concerns regarding childhood bullying and a need to identify a common bullying measure, this study examines the comparability of children's self-reports of bullying across five countries. The Pacific-Rim Bullying Measure, a self-report measure of students' experiences with six different types of bullying behavior and victimization, was administered to 1,398 grade 5 students from Australia, Canada, Japan, Korea, and United States. Multigroup confirmatory factor analysis and item response theory modeling were used to evaluate construct equivalence on the measure across different countries. Preliminary results revealed some construct differences across countries, that is, the bullying measure is measuring one construct, but that the construct is manifested differently in the different countries.

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