he question that arose was concerned withattitudes toward the mother-in-law. It asked whetherthese negative images of the mother-in-law were the sameacross cultures? In order to arrive at an answer, it wasdecided to use a figure-placement task. (Adler, 1978;Craubert & Adler, 1982) to measure projeced socialdistances as an indicator of the respondents’ attitudes. Ithad long been established that interpersonal space couldserve as a protection against threat, either to the subjects’physical integrity or to the self-esteem (Dosey & Meisels,1969). On the other hand, Little (1965) and Merhabian(1968) found that distance was a significant index of thesubject’s positive or negative attitudes toward a specificobject. In addition, in a study by Adler and Iverson (1975)it was verified that there was a clear parallel between thephysical interpersonal spacing in the laboratory situationand the projected social distances in response toascriptions of the stimulus persons.The present study examines the schemata relatingto several members of a family, such as ”Mother,””Father,” ”Mother-in-Law” and ”Father-in-Law.” Databy subjects from different parts of the world are comparedto those by US subjects. The present paper reports thecomparisons of the responses by Kuwaiti, Sudanese andUS-participants. In, these countries different patterns ofmate selection exist. For example, it is frequently thecustom in Arab countries for parents to select the spousesfor their children, while in the US men and women choosespouses for themselves. Would these behavior patternsinfluence attitudes toward family members? In thepresent paper the comparisons not only involve an overallanlysis, but focus on comparing the data from only twocountries atone time for a more precise evaluation.Following the pattern of previous studies (Sechrest,Fay, Zaidi & Flores, 1973) the subjects were students whoattended psychology and science classes at various38In a recent paper Usha Kumar (1984) discussed therelationship between mother- in law, son and daughter-inlawand described’ the triadic relationship in an IndianHindu joint family. While in North America, GreatBritain, and other Western societies jokes about themother-in-law are common, Kumar (1984) noted that suchjokes are extremely rare in Hindu society, where suchrelationships are considered as serious business. On theother hand, Radcliffe-Brown (1950) had observed thatresearch on the relationships of mother-in-Iaw/daughterin-law interactions had been neglected across cultures. Yetsurveys in Western societies reported that the mother-inlawwas the most disliked of all relatives (Duvall, 1984). Inmore recent years, Fischer (1983) compared theinterpersonal relationships of muther-in-Iaw/daughter-inlawwith to those of mother/daughter with regard to theorientation around the child (i, e. how the birth of a babyaffected these relationships). However, even before thebirth of the grandchild strained relationships with in-lawswere apparent.In the Hindu family there existed, in the presentsetting, a coalition of the mother with her son aginst thedaughter-in-law Kumar (1984) wrote that ” the basicassumption of the triad theory is that the relationship between any pair of actors can best be understood byexamining their conjoint relationship with a significantthird party. In the relationship between affinal relatives,the connecting spouse is likely to be the significant thirdparty. Thus we may unde: ~tand the relationship betweena daughter-in-law and a mother-in-law by examining therelationship of each to the man between them.” (p.Ll)These reports are examples, which illustrate some sourcesof the negative reputation of the image of the mother-inlaw