Sociodemographic variation and childhood predictors of showing love and care for others in 22 countries

Abstract

Showing love and care for other people is a vital aspect of human relationships. However, little is known about how levels of love/care expression differ across cultures and across sociodemographic groups within those different cultures, or about the potential childhood antecedents that are associated with love/care expression in adulthood. Based on nationally-representative data from 22 countries in six continents in the Global Flourishing Study (N = 202,898), we present ordered means of love/care expression across countries, observe its distributions across key sociodemographic characteristics, and evaluate the strength of its childhood predictors (with E-values as a robustness check), revealing the extent to which the distributions and associations are uniform throughout the world or differ by country. The mean levels of love/care expression (scaled 0–10) ranged from 9.05 in the Philippines to 5.96 in Japan and tended to be higher in countries in the Global South. Based on a random effects meta-analysis of means and a multivariate regression analysis of childhood predictors, we find evidence of both universal and country-specific influences. Age cohort, gender, self-rated health, and religious service attendance were the strongest childhood predictors. These findings enhance our understanding of the country-specific variations in love/care expression and early-life predictors of adult outcomes, providing a foundation for future investigations into sociocultural influences that might shape love/care expression.