Personality and affect in Hungarian and American short stories: A replication and extension

Abstract

Personality description extracted from a sample of 20th century American short stories were compared with those extracted from a matched sample of Hungarian short stories. The results reveal: (1) an emphasis in the American sample on the socioemotional domains of personality - like/love, dislike, fear, dysphoria — relative to that in the Hungarian sample; (2) an emphasis in the Hungarian sample relative to the American one on self-discipline, competence, and achievement. These results corroborate the reliability of a set of post-hoc observations from an earlier study (Rosenberg (1987)). A new finding in the present study is the relative emphasis on order/rationality in the American sample as compared with that of the Hungarian sample. Differences between the two samples in the expression of affect were also examined by extracting from the short stories all the references to feeling and emotions. Results of this comparison are not consistent with those found in the previous study. An examination of the affect data from the previous and present studies pooled together, suggest no over-all cross-cultural differences in the expression of affect.