Cultural psychologyChapter 14Mental health Disorders are usually defined as behaviours that are rare and cause some kind of impairment to the individual, although there are many exceptions to this general pattern. Some behaviours are considered problematic in one culture but not in another.Because the field of psychiatry is largely developed in the West, the disorders that re observed in the West are often viewed as the basic categories of diagnosis. When psychiatry is exported to other cultures, there is a tendency to evaluate the psychopathologies that are found in other cultures in terms of how well they fit into those basic categories that were developed in the West.The distinction between universal categories of mental illness and culture-bound syndromes is not always straightforward. The symptoms of some disorders might vary across cultures, even though the underlying causes of the problems are the same. Culture-bound syndromes are those that appear to be greatly influenced by cultural factors and hence occur far less frequently, or are manifested in highly divergent ways in other cultures. Eating disorders Eating disorders are some of the more common psychological disorders in North America. These are Bulimia nervosa and Anorexia nervosa. One commonly held view is that both disorders are culture-bound syndromes. The rates for both disorder have increased over the past 50 years, and it seems likely that changing cultural norms are at least partly...
What is cultural psychology? - summary of chapter 1 of cultural psychology
Cultural psychology
Chapter 1
What is cultural psychology?
Humans are a cultural species. People from different cultures live their lives differently.Psychological processes are shaped by experiences, and because people from different cultures have different experiences, we should expect to find differences in ways that they think.
Experiences do not determine psychological processes. These processes are constrained and afforded by the neurological structures that underlie them.
What is culture?
Culture means two different things: 1) a particular kind of information, any kind of information that is acquired from other members of one’s species through social learning that is capable of affecting an individual’s behaviours. 2) A particular group of individuals, individuals who are existing within some kind of shared context.
There are a few challenges with thinking about groups of people as constituting cultures. 1) The boundaries of cultures are not always clear-cut. There are other kinds of groups aside from countries that can be argued to have cultures. Their membership exists within a shared context, communicate with each other, have some norms that distinguish them from other groups, and have some common practice and ideas. 2) Cultures change over time. 3) There exists variability among individuals who belong to the same culture
Many basic psychological processes can emerge in starkly different ways across cultures.
Is the mind independent from, or intertwined with, culture?
Richard Shweder argues that much of the field of psychology inherently assumes that the mind operates under a set of natural and universal laws that are independent from context. But, in many important ways people are not the same wherever you go. General psychologists tend to be more captivated by arguments about human universality than about cultural variability. This interest arises because they tend to conceive the mind as a highly abstract central processing unit that operates independently from context.
An assumption that tends to be embraced by cultural psychologists is that in many ways, the mind does not operate independently of what it is thinking about. Thinking also involves interacting with the content that one is thinking about and participation in the context within which one is doing the thinking. The ways that people think about behaviours are influenced by the very specific and particular ways that human cultural knowledge shapes their understanding of those behaviours. Because humans are cultural
.....read more Culture and human nature - summary of chapter 2 of cultural psychologyCultural psychology
Chapter 2
Culture and human nature
Humans aren’t unique in their capability to learn information from other members of their species through social transmission. Even whales and pigeons do this. Some forms of cultural learning are evident across a broad swath of the animal kingdom.
Cultural learning
Humans are not unique in being able to engage in cultural leaning. But, humans seem to stand out in the extent of their cultural learning skills. Many aspects of human cultures are shared by nearly every member of the culture, this is not the case in other species. Humans also seem to be unique in whom they chose to imitate. We have a prestige bias, we are especially concerned with detecting who has prestige and then try to imitate what these individuals are doing.
Imitating prestigious others is a very effective way of cultural learning. Individuals are more likely to learn successfully if they target those people who are especially talented.
Because it is not clear what the critical behaviours of success are, individuals would fare best by having a general intimation mechanisms, by which they are attracted to prestigious individuals, whom they observe and try to imitate, regardless of what they are doing.
Humans’ unusually sophisticated cultural learning skills further rests on two key capacities. 1) The ability to consider the perspective of others 2) The ability to communicate with language
Theory of mind
A theory of mind means that people understand that others have minds that are different from their own, and thus that other people have perspectives and intentions that are different from their own. This is evident across all cultures, and it appears to develop at a fairly similar rate across cultures.
Such a theory of mind is not evident in most other species, and even in chimpanzees the evidence is mixed.
Human abilities and motivation to imagine the perspectives and intentions with others are far superior to those of chimps and other animals.
If individuals are able and motivated to undertint the intentions of others, then this provides an important step in being able to fruitfully engage in cultural learning. We are able to internalize another’s goals and reproduce them. In imitative learning, the learner internalizes something of the model’s goals and behavioural strategies. The learner is copying precisely what it thinks the model is trying to do.
In emulative learning, the learning is focused on the environmental events that are involved, how the use of one object could potentially effect changes in the state of the environment. This does not require imitating a model’s behavioural strategies. The learner is focusing
.....read more Cultural evolution - summary of chapter 3 of cultural psychologyCultural psychology
Chapter 3
Cultural evolution
Ecological and geographical variation
One way we can consider who cultural variation comes to be is to consider the ecologies within which cultures people live. Different environments affect the ways that people went about living their daily lives. These ecological differences can have some indirect effect on cultures as well. The different foraging behaviours can come to affect how the societies are structured and the values that people come to adopt.
The physical environments that we live in shape the array of lifestyles that are possible.
Small differences scan have large effects
Sometimes what might seem to be small variations in ecologies can lead to dramatically different cultures, especially as they unfold over time.
Proximal causes are those that have direct and immediate relations with their effects. Distal causes are those initial differences that lead to effects over long periods, often through indirect relations.
Diamond proposes that minor geographical differences in the availability of easy-to-domesticate species of plants and animals, and the position of Eurasia allowed people in Eurasia to develop complex societies.
Even cultural differences in ways of thinking can be influenced by geographical differences. For example, the differences in the need for working together to get food come to be reflected in thinking.
Transmitted versus evoked culture
There are two ways that we can understand how geography an contribute to cultural variation 1) Cultural norms can arise as direct responses to features of the ecology 2) Cultural norms can arise because of learning from other individuals.
Evoked culture is the notion that all people, regardless of where they are from, have certain biologically encoded behavioural repertoires that are potentially accessible to them, and that these repertoires are engaged when the appropriate situational conditions are present. Some cultural variation can thus be understood as the result of universal domain-specific psychological responses being activated in response to specific conditions. Evoked culture ties to particular geographical environments.
Transmitted culture holds that people come to learn about particular cultural practices through social learning or by modelling others who live near them. Although transmitted culture typically beings in a particular geographic area, it does not necessarily stay bound to a particular geography. Unlike evoked culture, transmitted culture can travel with people when they move to new environments.
The distinction between evoked and transmitted culture is not clear-cut. A particular behavioural script might be activated by a specific situational variable. When that script becomes a norm, then that
.....read more Methods for studying culture and psychology - summary of chapter 4 of cultural psychologyCultural psychology
Chapter 4
Methods for studying culture and psychology
The problem for cultural psychologists is that not only do they inherit the standard ambiguities of whatever methods they adopt from other subfields, but many of these methods create further ambiguities when applied to the study of people from other cultures.
What cultures should we study?
In general, it’s not recommended to randomly select cultures to study. Interpreting the results can be very difficult if there is no theory guiding the selection of cultures.
One common approach for selecting cultures is to choose samples based on a theoretical variable that you are investigating.
Sometimes you might want to explore the degree of universality of a particular psychological finding. A good first step would be to select two cultures that vary greatly on as many theoretical relevant dimensions as possible. If a similarity is found in a particular psychological process between two cultures that are maximally different, this would be compelling evidence for a high degree of universality for that process.
Making meaningful comparisons across cultures
After one has selected the cultures to study, it is critical that the researcher design a study so that the results can be meaningfully interpreted.
The importance of developing knowledge about the cultures under study
Cultural psychologists are often studying people from a different culture, and it is not always clear how much the researcher’s own experiences would generalize to the people she is studying. An important initial step in studying people from other cultures is to learn something about the culture under study.
One can learn about another culture in a variety of ways: 1) Read existing texts and ethnographies about the culture. Ethographies usually contain rich descriptions of a culture, or a particular situation or group of people within a culture, derived from extensive observation and interaction by an anthropologists 2) Find a collaborator who is from the culture you are studying and who is interested in pursuing the same research with you 3) Immerse oneself in another culture to learn it firsthand.
Contrasting highly different cultures versus similar cultures
There are culturally learned skills, also regarding completing surveys. It is meaningless to compare responses on surveys from people who have an understanding of how surveys work and those who don’t.
if we are to take meaningful comparisons across cultures, our participants must understand our questions or situations in equivalent ways. Methodological equivalence means having one’s methods perceived in identical ways across different cultures. A variety of statistical techniques are applied in cross-cultural studies of survey data to increase equivalence.
When
.....read more Development and socialization - summary of chapter 5 of cultural psychologyCultural psychology
Chapter 5
Development and socialization
Cultural knowledge skills are not in our heads form the beginning. We must learn these skills and we have certain biological potentials that enable us to learn them well.
Our universal foundation is shaped by our experiences, such that we are able to thrive in an extremely broad array of cultural environments. All human have been socialized into some kind of cultural environment that influences how they perceive and understand themselves and their worlds.
A sensitive period is a period of time in an organism’s development that allows for the relatively easy acquisition of a set of skills.
There is a trade-off between an organism’s ability to learn new behaviours that suit its new environment and its abilities to specialize in behaviours that are effective in particular environments.
Sensitive periods for language acquisition
One source of evidence for a sensitive period of language acquisition is with respect to people’s abilities to discriminate among different sounds. People are not able to discriminate easily between some phonemes that are not in their own language. Young infants an discriminate among all the phonemes that humans are able to produce. When we learn a language, it is functional to perceive sounds categorically. As we are exposed to a language, we begin to categorize sounds in ways that are used by that language, and this begins in very early life. Within the first year, infants begin to lose the ability to distinguish between closely related sounds that are not in their own language.
We are biologically prepared to attend to human speech as soon as we come into this world. This preference for speech predisposes us to start picking up languages. Early in life (before puberty), our brains are especially pliable for organizing themselves in response to language input. Later on, our brains are not as flexible.
Early In life the language centre of the brain is quite flexible at attuning itself to various kinds of linguistic input. After the sensitive period starts to close, those regions of the brain are no longer capable of being restructured to accommodate the new language.
We are socialized to understand different languages.
Sensitive periods for acquiring culture
Learning a language is a necessary aspect of being socialized into a particular culture. Language and culture are both meaning systems that
.....read more Self and personality - summary of chapter 6 of cultural psychologyCultural psychology
Chapter 6
Self and personality
Culture influences on people’s identities in at least two ways: 1) Superficial, it might include some culturally shaped statements. Culture provides the content about the ways people think of themselves. 2) Deeper, what categories of statements we consider when we think of ourselves.
The degree to which people think of themselves in terms of both abstract psychological attributes and concrete roles and relationships varies across cultures.
There are at least two ways people might see themselves 1) Independent view of self. The self can be thought to derive its identity from inner attributes. These attributes are assumed to reflect an inner essence of the individual in that they, are the basis of the individual’s identity, are viewed as stable across the lifespan, are perceived to be unique, are self-contained in that they are perceived to arise from the individual and not from interactions with others, are viewed as significant for regulating behaviour, individual feel an obligation to publicly advertise themselves in ways consistent with these attributes, and Interdependent view of self 2) The self is viewed as a relational entity that is fundamentally connected to, and sustained by, a number of significant relationships. Behaviour is recognized as contingent upon perceptions of others’ thoughts, feelings, and actions. Individuals are viewed as participants in a larger social unit. The experience of identity is reflexive in that it is contingent on their position relative to others, and their relationships with these close others. Internal characteristics are less central to the identity. People do not easily become ingroup members, nor do close relationships easily dissipate into outgroup relations.
The medial prefrontal cortex has been linked to self-representations.
Self-concepts organize information that we have about ourselves, direct our attention to information that is viewed to be relevant, shape the concerns that we have, guide us in our choice of relationships partners and the kinds of relationships that we maintain, and they influence how we interpret situations, which influences the emotional experiences we have.
People with independent selves have a number of close relationships
.....read more Living in multicultural worlds - summary of chapter 7 of Cultural psychologyCultural psychology
Chapter 7
Living in multicultural worlds
Acculturation is the process by which people migrate to and learn a culture that is different from their original (or heritage) culture.
Reaching consistent conclusions on acculturation is difficult because acculturating individuals have widely varying experiences. 1) People move to a new country for many reasons. 2) Acculturating individuals can move to dramatically different kinds of environments. 3) People move to cultures that vary in their similarity to their heritage culture. 4) Different individuals have different personalities, goals, and expectations that affect their acculturation experiences.
Moving to a new culture involves psychological adjustment. This adjustment occurs over a wide variety of domains: learning a new language, learning new interpersonal and social behaviours, becoming accustomed to new values, becoming a member of a minority group and adjusting one’s self-concept.
Changes in attitudes toward the host culture
Migrants are those who move from a heritage culture (their original culture) to a host culture (their new culture). This group includes sojourners (those who intend to stay only temporary), and immigrants (those who intend to move permanently).
A common pattern of adjustment to acculturation is a U-shaped curve. In the first few months people often have very positive feelings about the host culture, this is the honeymoon stage. Over time this gives way to the negative feelings associated with culture shock. The thrill of having novel and exotic experiences wears off and these experiences become tiring and difficult. In this stage, homesickness can become quite strong. Culture shock is the feeling of being anxious, helpless, irritable, and in general, homesick that one experiences on moving to a new culture. With time, people adjust to their new host culture and often develop positive feelings about it. This is the adjustment phase.
Sojourners can go through the same adjustment stages after they return to their home country.
This U-shaped curve does not characterize the adjustment pattern of everyone’s experiences.
Once societal feature of a host culture that seems to influence the acculturating individual’s adjustment is the ease with which migrants can be accommodated by the host culture. It is possible that in homogenous societies the adjustment phase takes longer.
Who adjusts better?
People tend to respond differently to the myriad challenges posted by acculturation, depending on the situation that they are in and
.....read more Motivation - summary of chapter 8 of cultural psychologyCultural psychology
Chapter 8
Motivation
Self-enhancement is the motivation to view oneself positively.
Self-esteem is the positivity of your overall evaluation of yourself.
Self-serving biases are tendencies for people to exaggerate how good they think they are. One important reason people have such biased views of themselves is that they are motivated to view themselves positively. In the absence of incontrovertible evidence people are likely to interpret the evidence in the most favourable way or just round upwards when given half the chance.
To secure a positive self-view, people can engage in: 1)Downward social comparison, when someone compares his or her performance with the performance of someone who is doing even worse than him/her. That casts the own performance in a positive light. Upward social comparison is when you compare with someone who does better than you. 2) Compensatory self-enhancement, when someone focuses on something positive but unrelated to a setback. You can compensate for the pain of a failure can again self-enhance by recruiting other kinds of positive thoughts about yourself. 3) Discounting the setback, reducing the perceived importance of the domain in which you performed poorly. 4) Making an external attribution to poor performance, attribute the causes of actions to something outside themselves. In an internal attribution people locate the cause within themselves. 5) Basking in the reflected glory of a successful group to which you belong.
Cultural variation in self-enhancing motivations
Motivations for positive self-views are powerful and pervasive.
Even at a young age, there is evidence for cultural variation in positive self-views.
Independence and self-enhancement are related. Differences in positive self-esteem are sustained by the ways people attend to and interpret events in the world.
Research on self-enhancing tendencies among people of East Asian descent shows a striking lack of enhancement motivations. East Asian samples show the opposite strategies than described above.
One possibility is that East Asians are just as motivated as Westerners to evaluate themselves positively, but biases in methodologies prevent us from seeing these motivations.
But, East Asians’ relatively self-critical views appear to generalize from their individual selves to their groups.
Another possibility is that East Asians value a different set of traits from those that have been explored by research so far. But, research doesn’t support this.
Another possibility is that these studies are not measuring people’s true feelings but are instead tapping into differences in cultural norms for describing oneself.
Overall, the research provides converging evidence that East Asians do not have as strong a desire to view themselves positively.
.....read more Cognition and perception - summary of chapter 9 of cultural psychologyCultural psychology
Chapter 9
Cognition and perception
In a taxomonic categorization strategy, stimuli are grouped according to the perceived similarity of their attributes. They are especially common among Westerners.
A thematic categorization strategy holds that stimuli are grouped together on the basis of causal, temporal, or spatial relationships among them. Common in East Asia.
Analytic thinking is characterized by a focus on objects and their attributes. Objects are perceived as existing independently from their contexts. They’re understood in terms of their component parts. The attributes that make up objects are used as a basis for categorizing them. A set of fixed abstract rules is used to predict and explain the behaviour of these objects.
Holistic thinking is characterized by an orientation to the context as a whole. It is an associative way of thinking, which gives attention to the relationships among objects and among the objects and the surrounding context. Objects are understood in terms of how they relate to the rest of the context, and their behaviour is predicted and explained on the basis of those relationships. It emphasizes knowledge gained through experience rather than the application of fixed abstract rules.
The origins of analytic and holistic thinking are argued to arise from the different social experiences people have within individualistic and collectivistic societies. People in collectivistic societies tend to be socialized in relational contexts and have their attention directed at relational concerns. People in individualistic societies are socialized to be independent and to have their attention focused on objects.
Cultural differences in understanding people (independent or interdependent) shape the kinds of information people attend to in their physical environments.
Analytic versus holistic thinking was apparent in Greek and Chinese thinking 2.500 years ago. That provided the intellectual groundwork. Holistic thinking is more common.
Attention is that at a given time, where one’s cognitive activity is directed. Analytic thinkers are more likely to focus their attention on separate parts of a scene. Holistic thinkers direct attention more broadly, across an entire scene.
Field independence is the ability to separate objects form their background fields. Field dependence is viewing object as bound to their backgrounds.
The cultural difference is evident at the neural level. As people age, their neural functions continue to be shaped by normative cultural attention patterns. People rely on different brain regions for processing visual information in scenes.
People from different cultures devote attention to other things. The stimuli
.....read more Emotions - summary of chapter 10 of cultural psychologyCultural psychology
Chapter 10
Emotions
The controversy regarding the similarities and differences of people’s emotional experience around the worlds is based on the disagreement about how we can define emotions.
The James-Lange theory of emotions
James proposed that emotions are the physiological response or ‘bodily reverberations’ to stimuli in the worlds. These physiological responses are products of the autonomic nervous system.
The James-Lange theory maintains that our bodies respond to stimuli in the world by preparing us to react in a survival-facilitating way and our emotions are bodily changes that signal how we should behave.
The theory has been expanded in many ways. Emotions are no longer seen to be just the physiological experience but rather also include appraisals, nonverbal expressions, neural patterns, and subjective feelings.
The two-factor theory of emotions
Emotions are primarily interpretations of those bodily responses.
Suggestions for the origins of emotions
The James-Lange theory and the Two-Factor theory make different predictions regarding whether emotional experience is universal or culturally variable.
If the various extensions of the James-Lange theory are correct, this suggests an evolutionary origin to human emotions. If emotions are specific biological signals that alert people to events in their world, it would follow that this biological machinery must have been assembled through evolution. This suggests that people in all cultures should have the same emotional experiences.
If the Two-Factor theory of emotion is correct it suggests that in addition to a physiological basis, emotions are grounded in the belief systems that shape people’s interpretations. Because belief systems are influenced by culture, people might interpret their physiological signals in different ways across cultures.
Emotions and facial expressions
Evidence for cultural universals in facial expressions
People in different cultures show a great deal of agreement about what feelings different facial poses are expressing.
Some facial expressions are universally similar around the world.
Ekman proposed that there is a set of basic emotions that are universally recognized around the world. These are: 1) Anger 2) Fear 3) Happiness 4) Sadness 5) Surprise, and 6) Disgust.
Evidence for cultural variability in facial expression
Emotional expressions are not just something that people learn growing up.
People are more accurate in judging the facial expressions of people from their own culture than those of another culture. There is a large universal component of recognizing facial expressions
.....read more Interpersonal attraction and close relationships - summary of chapter 11 of cultural psychologyCultural psychology
Chapter 11
Interpersonal attraction and close relationships
Physical attractiveness
There is cultural variation in what is viewed as attractive.
Around the world, physical attractiveness is a more significant factor in interpersonal attraction for women than it is for men.
Characteristics of physical attractiveness that appear to be universal are: 1) Complexion of the face. Skin that looks free of blemishes, blotches, sores, and rashes is viewed as more attractive. These are traits associated with health. 2) Bilateral symmetry. We are most attracted to people whose left sides of the bodies and faces look identical to their right sides. This can be seen as an indicator of developmental stability. This preference is stronger in hunting-gathering populations. 3) Attractive faces tend to be average. Facial features that are close to the average in size and in configuration are perceived as more attractive. People with average-size features are less likely to have genetic abnormalities, thus reflecting genetic health. Humans can quickly process something that resembles a prototype, and quick processing is associated with good feelings and feelings of attraction. This also holds in terms of how people view the attractiveness of those from other cultures. Multiracial faces are perceived as attractive.
The attractiveness of average features does not seem to generalize well to perception of bodies. The kinds of bodies that tend to be seen as most attractive are often those that depart considerably from the average.
One aspect of people’s bodies that varies in its perceived attractiveness across cultures is weight. The cultural differences in standards of beauty for female bodies differ not just across historical contexts but across current cultures as well.
Other bases of interpersonal attraction
The propinquity effect holds that people are more likely to become friends with people with whom they frequently interact.
The mere exposure effect holds that the more we are exposed to a stimulus, the more we are attracted to it. The attraction to frequently encountered stimuli appears to be due to the pleasant associations developed through classical conditioning when one learns that a stimulus is not threatening, and to the pleasant affect associated with easy-to-process stimuli. This appears to be a cultural universal.
Similarity-attraction effect
The similarity-attraction effect holds that people tend to be attracted to those who are most like themselves. This effect is stronger in the West.
There are no cultures in which people live as lone individuals.
The four elementary forms of relationships
Fiske claims that there is some underlying structure that is common to all forms of
.....read more Mental health - summary of chapter 14 of cultural psychologyCultural psychology
Chapter 14
Mental health
Disorders are usually defined as behaviours that are rare and cause some kind of impairment to the individual, although there are many exceptions to this general pattern. Some behaviours are considered problematic in one culture but not in another.
Because the field of psychiatry is largely developed in the West, the disorders that re observed in the West are often viewed as the basic categories of diagnosis. When psychiatry is exported to other cultures, there is a tendency to evaluate the psychopathologies that are found in other cultures in terms of how well they fit into those basic categories that were developed in the West.
The distinction between universal categories of mental illness and culture-bound syndromes is not always straightforward. The symptoms of some disorders might vary across cultures, even though the underlying causes of the problems are the same.
Culture-bound syndromes are those that appear to be greatly influenced by cultural factors and hence occur far less frequently, or are manifested in highly divergent ways in other cultures.
Eating disorders
Eating disorders are some of the more common psychological disorders in North America. These are Bulimia nervosa and Anorexia nervosa. One commonly held view is that both disorders are culture-bound syndromes. The rates for both disorder have increased over the past 50 years, and it seems likely that changing cultural norms are at least partly responsible. They are also more prevalent in some societies than in others.
A kind of inherited predisposition toward self-starvation might manifest itself through motivations for religious asceticism in some contexts and motivations to avoid weight gain in others. There are cultural differences in anorexia nervosa, but there are also many historical examples of people starving themselves. Some symptoms of anorexia are universal, although they are still influenced a great deal by culture.
Koro
One clinical syndrome that has been identified in a variety of countries in South and East Asia is koro. This is a morbid fear that one’s penis is shrinking into one’s body. In women, it manifests itself as a fear that one’s nipples are shrinking into one’s body.
Koro’s symptomology is nearly absent in most cultures, although it is not clear what cultural factors affect its prevalence. One interpretation is that it’s grounded in a classical Chinese medicine account of how an imbalance of yin and yang can cause the genitals to retract.
Some components of koro may be universally accessible, but they only
.....read more Cultural psychology
This magazine is about cultural psychology. This is the way in which psychology and culture influence each other.
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