Section 3 - Cognitive and Social Factors

To give readers a broad coverage of the field we suggest reading articles written from various perspectives. We hope that the contradictions in these readings will encourage readers to think critically about this controversial topic.

Diane F. Halpern is Professor of Psychology Emerita from Claremont McKenna College and Dean of Social Sciences Emerita from Minerva Schools at KGI. She has published many books and hundreds of journal articles on sex differences in cognitive abilities and critical thinking, and is the author of the Halpern Critical Thinking Assessment (HCTA). She is past president of the American Psychological Association, the Western Psychological Association, and the Society for the Teaching of Psychology. She was named the Federation of Associations in Behavioral & Brain Sciences (FABBS) Honored Scientist (IHO) “Who made important and lasting contributions to the science of mind, brain, and behavior.” www.fabbs.org/fabbs-foundation/honoring-our-scientists/honor-diane-f-ha/

Halpern was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In order to get a better understanding of psychology from numerous cultures, she taught courses (most of them a semester long) in Canada, Mexico, Turkey, Russia, China, and Portugal, among other places. Her parents immigrated to the United States to escape the dangerous growth of anti-Semitism in Europe. Her father was from Romania and her mother was from Poland. Her first language was Yiddish, which developed as a fusion of German, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Slavic languages. She has a racially mixed family.

Carmen Flores-Mendoza is a psychologist at Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil. She works on individual differences in intelligence and personality, especially in the Latin American context. Flores-Mendoza was born in Lima, Peru. In the 1980s, her family moved to Brazil to escape the armed conflict (internal war) between the government of Peru and the Communist Party of Peru (a terrorist group known as Shining Path). The armed conflict turned Peru into a country where it was not safe to live. Now she has two nationalities: Peruvian and Brazilian.  She attended University in the state of São Paulo, Brazil, and received her PhD from University of São Paulo. Her paternal grandmother was Chinese, and her paternal grandfather was indigenous Peruvian. Her maternal grandmother was “mulatto” (Black + White), and her maternal grandfather was a Spaniard (from Spain). So, Flores-Mendoza represents a mix of races.

Heiner Rindermann is a psychologist at TU Chemnitz, Germany, and works on education, ability development, intelligence, student achievement, economy and culture, and their interplay at the level of individuals and societies. Rindermann was born in Cologne, Germany, and grew up in Baden-Württemberg. He received his PhD from Heidelberg University. From 2008 to 2010, he was Professor of Evaluation and Methodology of Developmental Psychology at the University of Graz in Austria. He is a member of ISIR, APS, AEA, and Heterodox Academy. Science is for him an intellectual-philosophical task. He likes to walk, camp, and swim in the wilderness. He also likes to take photos (nature, architecture, art, people).

Joyce S. Pang is currently an Associate Professor of Psychology at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.  As a personality psychologist, she is interested in the assessment of individual differences and in making finer distinctions between personality dimensions in order to increase theoretical understanding of how personality affects behavior. Specifically, she adopts a person x situation perspective to understand how individual differences in motivation predict different reactions within different social contexts, which in turn lead to important personal and social outcomes.  She is particularly interested in the implicit motives for achievement, power, and affiliation: how to measure them, make differentiations between them, and determine how individual differences in these motives affect performance, health, and well-being. Pang was born and raised in Singapore. She attended Smith College in Massachusetts for her BA and obtained her PhD from University of Michigan.  She picked up Argentine tango in graduate school, and has danced ever since. After she obtained tenure, she took a short leave of absence to spend a couple months in Argentina learning more about the dance. She is currently living and working in Switzerland, and expects to be there for another two years.

Nicola Baumann is a Full Professor at the University of Trier, Germany. She did her diploma, PhD, and habilitation (the German postdoc qualification to gain tenure) at the University of Osnabrück. She has held research fellowships at the University of Rochester, New York (1999–2000), the Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand (2014–2015), and the University of Colorado at Boulder (2019). Baumann’s research on implicit motives, self-regulation, and self-determination is located at the intersection of personality, motivation, cognition, and social psychology. She investigates the “what” (what moves people to action) and “how” (how people regulate their action) of human goal striving from the broader perspective of Personality Systems Interactions (PSI) theory. In addition to her scientific achievements, she has worked as an applied psychologist and nurtures the exchange between research and practice.

Baumann was born and raised in Germany. She had four one-year stays abroad: 1983–1984 University High School of Northern Colorado, USA (at age 16); 1999–2000 University of Rochester, New York; 2014–2015 Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand; and 2019 University of Colorado at Boulder, Colorado. At the University of Osnabrück, there was a good mix of colleagues from the USA and Russia, allowing the integration of very different approaches to science.

Sumaya Laher is an Associate Professor in Psychology at the University of the Witwatersrand. Her doctoral and subsequent research into personality, psychometrics, and assessment has been instrumental in pioneering the usage and interpretation of key instruments in South Africa. Aside from psychological assessment, she contributes actively to research on indigenous knowledge systems with her work on traditional healing systems particularly those proposed by Islam, Hinduism, and African approaches. Laher is a South African Muslim woman born in Johannesburg, and completed her undergraduate and doctoral studies at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.

Fanny M. Cheung is Choh-ming Li Professor of Psychology and Vice-President (Research) at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her research expertise lies in cross-cultural personality assessment. She pioneered gender research in Greater China and served as the Founding Chairperson of the Equal Opportunities Commission in Hong Kong. She received the 2014 IAAP Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award and 2012 APA Award for Distinguished Contributions to the International Advancement of Psychology for her contributions to personality assessment across cultures and to the international advancement of women. Cheung was born in Hong Kong and studied in the United States for nine years from Grade 12 through her PhD degree. She returned to work in Hong Kong after her studies, and has spent sabbaticals in Oxford (UK) and the United States.

Pia Zeinoun is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the American University of Beirut’s Department of Psychology, and is Managing Director of the Psychological Assessment Center at the AUB Medical Center. Her research centers on the development of culturally appropriate tests of personality, psychopathology, and neurocognitive abilities. Dr. Zeinoun has a PhD in Psychology from Tilburg University in the Netherlands, and advanced graduate training at the Johns Hopkins/Kennedy Krieger Institute in Maryland, USA. Zeinoun was born in Lebanon, but sought refuge in Cyprus with her family during the Lebanese Civil War. After spending ten years in Cyprus, where Greek became her native language, she returned to Lebanon as a teenager.  It was only then that she learned English at an American-system school, and Arabic as a second language. She has now settled in her diverse country of origin, Lebanon.

Algae K. Y. Au was born and raised in Hong Kong. She is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Applied Social Sciences at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. During her undergraduate studies, she was a first-class honors student, a two-time winner of the Scholarship for Outstanding Students, and a recipient of the Outstanding Thesis Award in Psychology, and she was included on the Dean’s Honors List. Her research interests include bilingualism, biculturalism, and intercultural relationships, which have also been the major areas of her publications in the past few years. Guided by her current interest in ecopsychology, her doctoral thesis focuses on the effects of ecological self-construal on psychological and pro-environmental outcomes.

Sylvia Xiaohua Chen is a Professor in the Department of Applied Social Sciences at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Her research interests include the social psychology of bilingualism and biculturalism, personality and social behavior in cultural contexts, cultural diversity and mental health, and, more recently, globalization and multiculturalism. She served as an Associate Editor of Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology and Asian Journal of Social Psychology. She was a recipient of an Early Career Award conferred by the International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology, Michael Harris Bond Award for Early Career Research Contributions, and Jung-heun Park Young Scholar Award conferred by the Asian Association of Social Psychology. Chen was born in Guangzhou, China and grew up there. She attended college at Sun Yat-Sen University in Guangzhou, and obtained her MA at Santa Clara University in the USA, where she studied and worked for six years. Then she studied for an MPhil and PhD at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She has remained in Hong Kong for over 20 years. As a social and cultural psychologist, she believes she is influenced by Hong Kong, Mainland Chinese, and American cultures.

Susan E. Cross is a faculty member of the Department of Psychology at Iowa State University.  Her current research focuses on the intersection of culture, self, and close relationships.  Specifically, she studies how concerns for honor motivate behavior in cultures such as Turkey and southern regions of the USA (funded by the US National Science Foundation).  She is also curious about how cultural values, norms, and beliefs influence conceptions of close relationships in East Asian contexts.  Her background is eclectic, with degrees in Horticulture and Higher Education, but she found her way to a PhD program at the University of Michigan, where she had the privilege of working with Professor Hazel Markus. She is thankful every day for the opportunity to pursue interesting questions with students and postdoctoral scholars from around the world.  Cross was born and raised in Texas, by two natives of the US South. She considers herself a product of an honor culture. When she was a senior in college, her father moved first to Saudi Arabia (for three years) and then to Tokyo (for three years). Visiting these countries sparked her interest in culture, in part because, although both countries were collectivist, non-Western contexts, they differed greatly from each other. Cross is a motherless woman, who has valued the presence of women friends, aunts, and others who filled in the gap for her. She identifies as a Christian; a White woman married to a Hispanic man; a Texan/ Southerner; a mother of boys; a gardener; and many other things.