Browsing by Author "Karwowski, Maciej"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3

Citation - WoS: 94
Citation - Scopus: 103
Affective Interpersonal Touch in Close Relationships: a Cross-Cultural Perspective
(Sage Publications Inc, 2021) Sorokowska, Agnieszka; Saluja, Supreet; Sorokowski, Piotr; Frackowiak, Tomasz; Karwowski, Maciej; Aavik, Toivo; Akello, Grace; Can, Seda; Croy, Ilona
Interpersonal touch behavior differs across cultures, yet no study to date has systematically tested for cultural variation in affective touch, nor examined the factors that might account for this variability. Here, over 14,000 individuals from 45 countries were asked whether they embraced, stroked, kissed, or hugged their partner, friends, and youngest child during the week preceding the study. We then examined a range of hypothesized individual-level factors (sex, age, parasitic history, conservatism, religiosity, and preferred interpersonal distance) and cultural-level factors (regional temperature, parasite stress, regional conservatism, collectivism, and religiosity) in predicting these affective-touching behaviors. Our results indicate that affective touch was most prevalent in relationships with partners and children, and its diversity was relatively higher in warmer, less conservative, and religious countries, and among younger, female, and liberal people. This research allows for a broad and integrated view of the bases of cross-cultural variability in affective touch.
Citation - WoS: 2
Citation - Scopus: 3
Conservatism Negatively Predicts Creativity: a Study Across 28 Countries
(Sage Publications Inc, 2024) Groyecka-Bernard, Agata; Sorokowski, Piotr; Karwowski, Maciej; Roberts, S. Craig; Aavik, Toivo; Akello, Grace; Alm, Charlotte; Dural, Seda; Sorokowska, Agnieszka
Previous studies have found a negative relationship between creativity and conservatism. However, as these studies were mostly conducted on samples of homogeneous nationality, the generalizability of the effect across different cultures is unknown. We addressed this gap by conducting a study in 28 countries. Based on the notion that attitudes can be shaped by both environmental and ecological factors, we hypothesized that parasite stress can also affect creativity and thus, its potential effects should be controlled for. The results of multilevel analyses showed that, as expected, conservatism was a significant predictor of lower creativity, adjusting for economic status, age, sex, education level, subjective susceptibility to disease, and country-level parasite stress. In addition, most of the variability in creativity was due to individual rather than country-level variance. Our study provides evidence for a weak but significant negative link between conservatism and creativity at the individual level (beta = -0.08, p < .001) and no such effect when country-level conservatism was considered. We present our hypotheses considering previous findings on the behavioral immune system in humans.
Citation - WoS: 18
Citation - Scopus: 20
Global Study of Social Odor Awareness
(Oxford Univ Press, 2018) Sorokowska, Agnieszka; Groyecka, Agata; Karwowski, Maciej; Frackowiak, Tomasz; Lansford, Jennifer E.; Ahmadi, Khodabakhsh; Alghraibeh, Ahmad M.; Dural, Seda
Olfaction plays an important role in human social communication, including multiple domains in which people often rely on their sense of smell in the social context. The importance of the sense of smell and its role can however vary inter-individually and culturally. Despite the growing body of literature on differences in olfactory performance or hedonic preferences across the globe, the aspects of a given culture as well as culturally universal individual differences affecting odor awareness in human social life remain unknown. Here, we conducted a large-scale analysis of data collected from 10 794 participants from 52 study sites from 44 countries all over the world. The aim of our research was to explore the potential individual and country-level correlates of odor awareness in the social context. The results show that the individual characteristics were more strongly related than country-level factors to self-reported odor awareness in different social contexts. A model including individual-level predictors (gender, age, material situation, education, and preferred social distance) provided a relatively good fit to the data, but adding country-level predictors (Human Development Index, population density, and average temperature) did not improve model parameters. Although there were some cross-cultural differences in social odor awareness, the main differentiating role was played by the individual differences. This suggests that people living in different cultures and different climate conditions may still share some similar patterns of odor awareness if they share other individual-level characteristics.