The purpose of the present study is to provide insight on the debate concerning how best to organize societies: with more freedom (looseness) or with more constraint (tightness). In a comparison of 32 nations, Harrington, Boski, and Gelfand examine the relationship between tightness/looseness and three dimensions of societal well-being: psychosocial, health, and political/economic outcomes. Findings indicate that excessive constraint and/or freedom contribute to poorer psychosocial, health, and economic/political outcomes, as well as overall national-level well-being. These results suggest that a balance of freedom and constraint is associated with optimal societal well-being.

This article builds upon gender inequality theory to examine childhood gender inequality in preindustrial societies. Multivariate and cluster analysis are used.

This study investigates previous findings that indicate precolonial centralization was beneficial for development in Africa. Using new survey data from public primary schools, the author shows that the failure of leaders of centralized regions to comply with federal regimes was punished with underinvestment in public infrastructure services, hindering development and limiting access to these services in recent populations. The author proposes that the extent to which precolonial centralization was beneficial for development in Africa is mediated by compliance of the local governing bodies with federal regimes.

Using regression analyses with a sample of over one million under 5 children across 66 developing nations from the Demographic and Health Survey, this study explores the impact of son preference on health disparities between male and female children. The authors consider the Grossman Theory (1972), which suggests health as a lasting "capital stock in the production of healthy time". The idea is that health gradually diminishes and can be restored through investments in various health-related factors such as nutrition and medical services. Although parents with son preference may make distinct and rational investments in both genders, favoritism may impact the health outcomes of female children. The authors suggest that the degree of son preference's impact will vary between families according to their socio-economic background. There is support for both hypotheses, since the results show that son preference enhances health disparities based on gender and disproportionately affects female children of lower socioeconomic backgrounds.

Authors explore the relationship between privacy among newlywed couples and romantic love as a basis for marriage. Authors also consider the relationship between newlywed privacy and kin avoidence. Both associations are found to be statistically significant.

This study negates the hypothesis that romantic love is unique to Euro-American culture and provides evidence of romantic love in the majority of cultures sampled.

Based on work by Rosenblatt (1966), this article tests a hypothesis relating sexual freedom to romantic love. Findings suggest a relationship between premarital and extramarital sexual permissiveness equality for women and men and romantic love.

This paper presents research on the factors that promote romantic love as a basis for marriage in non-industrial societies. After a discussion of the previous literature on romantic love in ethnographic societies, the authors used the SCCS, EA, and data from eHRAF to create a data set of 109 cultures and then utilized multiple ordinal regression to test the relationship between different types of families and post-marital residence practices and the importance of romantic love in marriage. The findings show that monogamy is significantly correlated with romantic love, while nuclear family organization and neolocal post-marital residence are not significantly correlated. The presence of polygyny is found to lower the probability of romantic love being a basis for marriage. These findings contradict previous research, which found a relationship between non-neolocal post-marital residence and the presence of romantic love in marriage.

This study examines the relationship between satisfaction of early oral and dependence needs and concern with affection in adulthood. Data showed significant support for an association between the satisfaction of early oral needs (but not the satisfaction of dependence needs) and concern for affection in adulthood.

This article examines reasons for the variation in sexual foreplay practices cross-culturally. Results suggest that exclusive mother-child sleeping arrangements is significantly associated with the presence of foreplay.