This work extends examination of African American students’ attitudes toward learning and achievement to contrast the oppositional culture (Ogbu and Fordham) and cultural integrity perspectives. We assessed 200 students’ responses to classrooms designed to support competitive, individualistic, communal or high-verve thinking, and behavior. Students preferred activity structures and physical ecologies supporting the expression of communalism and high verve. Relationships with grade point average (GPA) were also examined. Interviews corroborated the questionnaires. Students’ positive attitudes toward academic success are moderated by the value orientation of what must be done to succeed. Implications for reinterpreting students’ resistant/disengaged behavior are discussed.

Research on Culturally Relevant Pedagogy claims that culture drives students’ attitudes and behaviors to determine what learning contexts best scaffold learning but operationalizes race/ethnicity. This study extends the developmental range of this work and compares race/ethnicity and self-reported group orientation as predictors. In total, 138 high school (Study 1) and 118 college (Study 2) students completed a math task after a learning session. Race/ethnicity alone was not predictive. High group orientation students performed best after communal learning, while low scorers did best after competitive learning in both studies. This was true for Black participants only. More nuanced examination of these issues is needed.

The current study examined lasting learning effects of communal contexts for 124 African American third and fourth-grade students using a mathematics fractions unit with students’ regularly assigned teachers. Teachers in two experimental conditions received training on implementing communally or individually structured fractions curricula, and a naturalistic control was included whose participants did not receive the intervention. Findings revealed that students in the communal condition outperformed those who learned individually, and students in both intervention conditions outperformed those in the naturalistic control group. Survey of communal home-socialization obtained a relationship with identifying fractions performance. Implications for facilitative effects of culturally informed learning environments and teacher training toward enhanced academic achievement are discussed.

A. Wade Boykin's scholarship has provided key insights into the psychological realities of racially minoritized people and catalyzed revolutionary changes in psychology and education. Combining insights from personal and research experiences, Boykin authored the foundational triple quandary (TQ), a framework describing how Black Americans must navigate the often conflicting values and priorities of dominant mainstream society, the heritage culture of Black communities, and dynamics associated with being racially minoritized. TQ describes the unique developmental challenges faced by Black children, for whom misalignment between home cultural socialization and U.S. schooling often leads to pathologizing mischaracterizations of their attitudes and behaviors, resulting in chronic academic opportunity gaps. Boykin used his training as an experimental psychologist to empirically test the validity and explanatory utility of the TQ framework and to determine whether Black cultural values could be leveraged to improve student learning. Focusing on cultural values such as expressive movement, verve, and communalism, studies with his collaborators consistently supported Boykin's framework and predictions for improving Black student achievement-related outcomes. Beginning in the early 2000s, Boykin and his colleagues began to scale the lessons of decades of empirical work into the talent quest model for school reform. The TQ and talent quest continue to evolve in their application, as scholars and practitioners have found them relevant to a diverse range of minoritized populations in American society and beyond. Boykin's work continues to bear on the scholarship, career outcomes, and day-to-day lives of many scholars, administrators, practitioners and students across disciplines and institutions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

All over the world, nations have spent much of the last 20 years scrambling to increase and improve access to basic education. Globally, the number of people without access to a basic education has fallen significantly in the years since the goals of Education For All (EFA) were announced in 2000 at the World Education Forum in Dakar, Senegal, and extended at Incheon, South Korea, in 2016. This is ostensibly very good news. While universal access to a basic education is certainly a worthy goal, one can raise significant questions about the orientation of these efforts and the manner in which they are being pursued. For example, very little attention seems to have been paid to what the schools are or will be like, or to how the nations and people they must serve may be different from those for whom they were designed. To understand the inevitable problems that flow from this potential mismatch, it is useful to examine education in nations that have achieved more or less universal access to basic education. Many of the educational, social, economic, and social justice disparities that plague those nations are today understood as natural effects of the educational infrastructures in operation. Examination of recent empirical research and practice that attends to the importance of social and cultural factors in education may allow nations that are currently building or scaling up access to head off some predictable and difficult problems before they become endemic and calcified on a national scale. Nations who seize the opportunity to build asset-based and culturally responsive pedagogies into their educational systems early on may, in time, provide the rest of the world with much needed leadership on these issues.

Much of the scholarship concerning African American culture is premised on the notion that it is a legacy of African origins but there has been essentially no attempt to document that relationship empirically. This paper briefly reviews existing evidence for cultural continuity in the Diaspora and then compares the responses of Black and Coloured South African and African Americans on measures of culture emic to African American populations. The observed patterns of psychometric performance, participants' responses, and the predictive utility of the measures employed were consistent with the thesis that despite inevitable variation, these three groups of the African Diaspora share similar orientations on the cultural themes assessed. This research hopes to initiate empirical work on the continuity thesis as it applies to connecting African American culture with a legacy of Africa and as related more broadly to the study of global Diasporas.

Early work by Hofstede ( Behavior Science Research, 18 (4), 285–305, 1983 ) described Costa Rica as among the most culturally collective of 52 countries studied. Later work described the people of Costa Rica as low in group orientation, an outlier compared to other Latin American populations (Oyserman et al. Psychological Bulletin, 128 (1), 3–72, 2002 ). To examine this inconsistency, the current study assessed 69 Costa Rican university students’ responses on two well-known explicit attitude measures and one scenario measure of implicit tendencies (Kitayama et al. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 97(2), 236–255, 2009 ) related to group orientation. Responses were compared to those of North American participants who were of European (40) and African (60) heritage. Reliability estimates varied among the measures and in the sample groups. Costa Ricans did not differ from U.S. participants in interdependent but scored higher than both US groups in independent self-construal. Their communalism scores were lower. On the measure of implicit tendencies, however, they rated themselves more similar to communal than individualistic and competitive peers, and less similar to the individualistic peer than did either group of U.S. participants. These findings complicate the question of whether Costa Rican group orientation is at odds with other Latin American populations and raise important general questions about cross group measurement of culture.

ABSTRACTObjectiveWe examined whether two key emotion regulation strategies, cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression, moderated the relations between discrimination (i.e., foreigner objectification and general denigration) and adjustment.MethodsParticipants were U.S. Latino/a and Asian‐heritage college students (N = 1,279, 67% female, 72% U.S. born) from the Multi‐Site University Study of Identity and Culture (MUSIC). Students completed online self‐report surveys in 2009.ResultsMulti‐group path analysis demonstrated that a fully constrained model fit well for both Latino/a and Asian‐heritage student data. The results showed that with increasing levels of denigration (but not foreigner objectification), the combination of lower cognitive reappraisal and higher expressive suppression was related to greater depressive symptoms, anxiety, and aggression.ConclusionsOur findings highlight the importance of examining multiple emotion regulation strategies simultaneously—considering what strategies are available to individuals and in what combination they are used—to understand how best to deal with negative emotions resulting from experiencing discrimination.

Ethnic–racial identity (ERI) development is important for ethnic–racial minority youth because of its association with their positive adjustment. Guided by Garcia Coll’s ecocultural framework and using survey data from 729 Black college students, we examined the associations between relationships with parents (i.e., disrespect, psychological control, nurturance, and connection), ethnic–racial socialization (ERS), and ERI in hopes of understanding ways to promote ERI formation. Findings from two multiple group models suggested that, among men, nurturance from mothers and fathers was associated with ERI and these associations were mediated by ERS. For women, connection with mothers was associated with ERI through ERS and nurturance from fathers was indirectly and positively associated with ERI through ERS. Contrary to our hypothesis, disrespect from fathers was positively associated with ERI via ERS, but only for women. Findings suggest that both ERS and the parent–child relationship are important for ERI formation among Black emerging adults.

OBJECTIVES Past research has established that the Multigroup Ethnic Identity Measure (MEIM) exhibits measurement invariance across diverse ethnic groups. However, relatively little research has evaluated whether this measure is invariant across generational status. Thus, the present study evaluates the invariance of the MEIM across foreign-born, second-generation, and later-generation respondents. METHOD A large, ethnically diverse sample of college students completed the MEIM as part of an online survey (N = 9,107; 72.8% women; mean age = 20.31 years; SD = 3.38). RESULTS There is evidence of configural and metric invariance, but there is little evidence of scalar invariance across generational status groups. CONCLUSIONS This study suggests that the MEIM has an equivalent factor structure across generation groups, indicating it is appropriate to compare the magnitude of associations between the MEIM and other variables across foreign-born, second-generation, and later-generation individuals. However, the lack of scalar invariance suggests that mean-level differences across generational status should be interpreted with caution. (PsycINFO Database Record

Prior person-centered research has consistently identified a subgroup of highly religious participants that uses significantly less alcohol when compared to the other subgroups. The construct of religious motivation is absent from existing examinations of the nuanced combinations of religiousness dimensions within persons, and alcohol expectancy valuations have yet to be included as outcome variables. Variable-centered approaches have found religious motivation and alcohol expectancy valuations to play a protective role against individuals’ hazardous alcohol use. The current study examined latent religiousness profiles and hazardous alcohol use in a large, multisite sample of ethnically diverse college students. The sample consisted of 7412 college students aged 18–25 ( M age = 19.77, SD age = 1.61; 75 % female; 61 % European American). Three latent profiles were derived from measures of religious involvement, salience, and religious motivations: Quest - Intrinsic Religiousness (highest levels of salience, involvement, and quest and intrinsic motivations; lowest level of extrinsic motivation), Moderate Religiousness (intermediate levels of salience, involvement, and motivations) and Extrinsic Religiousness (lowest levels of salience, involvement, and quest and intrinsic motivations; highest level of extrinsic motivation). The Quest - Intrinsic Religiousness profile scored significantly lower on hazardous alcohol use, positive expectancy outcomes, positive expectancy valuations, and negative expectancy valuations, and significantly higher on negative expectancy outcomes, compared to the other two profiles. The Extrinsic and Moderate Religiousness profiles did not differ significantly on positive expectancy outcomes, negative expectancy outcomes, negative expectancy valuations, or hazardous alcohol use. The results advance existing research by demonstrating that the protective influence of religiousness on college students’ hazardous alcohol use may involve high levels on both quest and intrinsic religious motivation.

Objective: This cross-sectional study was conducted to investigate which components of acculturation relate to drinking games participation among Hispanic college students. We also sought to examine whether the relationships between acculturation and drinking games would differ from the associations between acculturation and other alcohol-related outcomes. Method: A sample of 1,397 Hispanic students aged 18-25 (75% women; 77% US-born) from 30 US colleges and universities completed a confidential online survey. Results: Associations among acculturative processes, drinking games participation, general alcohol consumption, and negative drinking consequences differed across gender. Most significant findings emerged in the domain of cultural practices. For women, US cultural practices were associated with greater general alcohol consumption, drinking games frequency, and amount of alcohol consumed while gaming, whereas for men, US cultural practices were associated with general alcohol consumption and negative drinking consequences. Conclusions: Hispanic and US cultural practices, values, and identifications were differentially associated with drinking games participation, and these associations differed by gender. It is therefore essential for college student alcohol research to examine US culture acquisition and Hispanic culture retention separately and within the domains of cultural practices, values, and identifications.

IntroductionA drinking game (DG) is a high-risk, social drinking activity that consists of certain rules (i.e., when to drink and how much to consume) designed to promote inebriation and that requires each player to perform a cognitive and/or motor task (Zamboanga et al., 2013). Research suggests that non-White or female students who play DGs are at an increased risk of experiencing alcohol-related problems. Thus, this study examined whether the associations between DG participation and alcohol-related problems were similar for men and women and across ethnic groups.MethodCollege students (N=7409; 73% women; 64% White, 8% Black, 14% Hispanic, 14% Asian) from 30 U.S. colleges/universities completed self-report questionnaires. Results: Controlling for age, site, Greek membership (i.e., membership in a fraternity or sorority), and typical alcohol consumption, results indicated that the association between DG participation and alcohol-related problems was stronger for men compared to women. With respect to ethnicity, the association between these variables was stronger among Black women than Black men.ConclusionsFindings from this large-scale study highlight the need to closely investigate how gender and ethnicity moderate the associations between DG participation and alcohol-related problems. College intervention efforts designed to address high-risk drinking behaviors such as DG participation might consider paying close attention to ethnic minority populations, perhaps particularly Black women.

Previous research on culture and emotion regulation has focused primarily on comparing participants from individualistic and collectivistic backgrounds (e.g., European Americans vs. Asians/Asian Americans). However, ethnic groups that are equally individualistic or collectivistic can still vary notably in cultural norms and practices regarding emotion regulation. The present study examined the association between expressive suppression and well-being in two collectivistic ethnic groups (i.e., Chinese Americans and Mexican Americans). Results indicated that suppression of positive emotions was related to lower hedonic and eudaimonic well-being among Mexican Americans but not among Chinese Americans. Moreover, post hoc analysis revealed that Mexican Americans with a stronger collective identity reported lower eudaimonic well-being when suppressing positive emotions than Mexican Americans with a weaker collective identity. Suppression of negative emotions, by contrast, was unrelated to hedonic and eudaimonic well-being for both ethnic groups. Overall, our findings underscore the importance of taking into account the role that culture and the characteristics of emotion (e.g., valence) may play in the link between emotion regulation and well-being.

BACKGROUND:Prior literature has shown that ethnic affirmation, one aspect of ethnic identity, is positively associated with mental health. However, the associations between ethnic affirmation and mental health may vary depending how much importance individuals place on their ethnic group membership (ie, centrality).METHODS:Using path analysis, the current study examined the relations between ethnic affirmation and indices of mental health problems (ie, anxiety and depressive symptoms), and tested whether the process was moderated by ethnic centrality among 3,659 college students representing 3 ethnic groups (41% Latino/a, 35% Asian American, and 24% African American) who participated in a large, multisite university study.RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS:Results suggested that the associations between ethnic affirmation and mental health were stronger for Latino/a and Asian American students who reported higher levels of ethnic centrality. For African Americans, higher levels of ethnic affirmation predicted better mental health, but this association did not vary as a function of ethnic centrality.

The present studies examined the extent to which (a) communalism, familism, and filial piety would pattern onto a single family/relationship primacy construct; (b) this construct would be closely related to indices of collectivism; and (c) this construct would be related to positive psychosocial functioning and psychological distress. In Study 1, 1,773 students from nine colleges and universities around the United States completed measures of communalism, familism, and filial piety, as well as of individualistic and collectivistic values. Results indicated that communalism, familism, and filial piety clustered onto a single factor. This factor, to which we refer as family/relationship primacy, was closely and positively related to collectivism but only weakly and positively related to individualism and independence. In Study 2, 10,491 students from 30 colleges and universities in 20 U.S. states completed measures of communalism, familism, and filial piety, as well as of positive psychosocial functioning and psychological distress. The family/relationship primacy factor again emerged and was positively associated with both positive psychosocial functioning and psychological distress. Clinical implications and future directions for the study of cultural values are discussed.