This book chapter tests new and pre-existing theories (Horton, Field, Bacon et al.) for the cause of variation in drinking across cultures. Folktale content is used to test psychological variables more directly than has been done previously. Folktale content is analyzed programmatically with an acknowledged error level of up to one-third. Results lend support to Field's 1962 theory that loose social organization facilitates drinking.

This study investigates the strategic mode of competition in both games of strategy and folk talkes. Various significant relationships between games of strategy, folktales, social complexity, and child rearing variables are observed.

This study examines aggression in folktales in relation to child socialization variables. The author suggests that punishment for aggression and aggression anxiety are related to how aggression is portrayed in folktales. Hypotheses are supported.

This article expands on Buss's (1989) study of the differences in male and female mate preferences in Western folktale characters by adding non-Western data. The new results show support for Buss's original findings.

The authors compare language phylogenies and spatial distributions with folktale frequencies of Indo-European peoples in order to reconstruct their cultural transmission. A stronger association is found between folktale frequency and language phylogeny than has been proposed in earlier literature studies, indicating that vertical transmission is more influential on folktale distribution than horizontal transmission through spatial proximity. Finally, the frequencies of certain folktales appear to trace the ancestral divergences of Indo-European languages to a much deeper level than previously though, suggesting that folktales are representative of broader features of culture, rather than recent literary inventions.

Authors study the correlation between maternal behavior and reference to odors in folktales. They find several significant relationships between odor references in folk tales, maternal behavior, and various aspects of infant and child socialization.

This paper is an investigation into the relationship between social differentiation as a proxy for societal 'development' and various categories of crime. A positive relationship is interpreted by the author as empirical cross-cultural support for Durkheim's theory that these two factors will increase together as parallel processes of 'sociocultural evolution'.

This study tests a broad "risk response" hypothesis: environmental risk can reduce parents' involvement and care which, through its effects on children's behavioral strategies later in life, ultimately produces a larger cultural model favoring risky behavior. Examinations of extramarital sex, aggression, theft, and witchcraft support this hypothesis, leading the authors to suggest that child development is the underpinning of cultural adaptation in the face of environmental change.

The author attempts to test the "Oedipus-complex" hypothesis--the psychoanalytic idea that under certain conditions (such as the long-post partum sex taboo) males are sexually attracted to their mothers and as a consequence certain fears and anxiety are generaated. The hypothesis is tested at the societal-level using ethnographic data.

The relationships of aggression and crime to variables of childhood experience, adult behavior, and social structure are cross-culturally analyzed.