This article examines predictors of intimacy between husbands and wives. Emphasis is on equality of spouses. A causal model is presented.

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.

Previous cross-cultural studies of romantic love have, in the authors' view, been plagued by vague definitions of the concept and a conflation of cultural, bio-psychological, and social factors. Thus, the authors distinguish between the social aspect of romantic love (which they argue is a universal human predisposition) and the variable cultural valuation of romance. In a large cross-cultural sample, the authors test the hypotheses that gender equality and family organization are important predictors of the cultural valuation of 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 explores predictors of variation in two dimensions of marital residence patterns among hunter-gatherers: 1) the tendency toward patrilocality versus matrilocality and 2) the tendency toward unilocality versus bilocality.

The present research investigates food sharing and labor sharing practices of 98 nonindustrial societies. The aims are to: 1) document the frequency and scope of sharing, and 2) test the theory that greater sharing is adaptive in societies subject to more resource stress (including natural hazards).

This article uses the Standard Cross-Cultural Samples to test the relationship between disease and economic growth among sub-Saharan African societies. The authors suggest that a higher disease prevalence limits social integration and economic development since pre-colonial times. The variable measuring economic growth is the complexity of large or impressive structures. The hypotheses are that 1) pathogen stress is negatively correlated to the presence of complex buildings, and 2) pathogen stress is positively correlated to increased ethnic diversity. The results support both hypotheses, and there are additional results, like 1) the negative correlation between pathogen stress and current income per capita and 2) the negative correlation between the increased ethnic diversity and current income per capita. Overall, this article shows the robust relationship between disease and economic development.

This study relates the type of games present in a society to the level of cultural complexity. Authors use a "game-type combination scale" that categorizes societies as having: 1) games of physical skill only; 2) games of physical skill and games of chance; and 3) games of physical skill, games of chance, and games of strategy. Results show a relationship between the game-type combination scale and indicators of cultural complexity.

This article considers the consequences of modernization. Factor analysis is used to identify four stages of modernization: 1) changes in education, government, and trade; 2) changes in health, technology, and transportation; 3) changes in family, religion, and toilet; and 4) changes in behavior. The authors then consider five trends they expect to be associated with modernization and test whether they develop over the course of the four stages. Results indicate that these 5 trends—increased cultural complexity, female status, pacification, suicide, and social stress—are associated with only the first and fourth stages.

This article investigates a cultural patterning of altered states of consciousness. The authors use an ordinal variable for a society's trance type; its four levels are 1) trance, 2) trance and possession trance, 3) possession trance, and 4) neither type. Results suggest that trance type is associated with measures of societal complexity and subsistence economy. Regional differences and the effects of diffusion are also examined.