ABSTRACT
Across cultures studied, people recognize the existence of individual personality traits and personality traits appear to be useful in predicting behavior, however there are cultural differences in traitedness, that is the extent to which people believe that their traits are stable and consistent. Nearly all of the early personality psychology theorists came from a similar Western tradition in terms of the cultural values and assumptions inherent in their theories. In the 1930s and 1940s, a major research focus of psychological anthropologists was the study of culture and personality. A major goal of research in personality psychology is identifying etic, or universal, dimensions of personality. Across cultures, there is much similarity in the emotions people report experiencing, the events that trigger those emotions, and the subjective and physiological responses that accompany those emotions. Cultures differ in how emotions are expressed, both verbally and nonverbally.
