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Health and Illness: positive concept of health and negative concepts of disease/ illness/ sickness are defined differently in different cultures!
Culture influences:
Culture can be thought of as a set of implicit and explicit guidelines/information that individuals acquire as members of a particular society or context, regarding, eg how to view the world/ how to experience emotions/ how to behave in relation to other people/ to supernatural forces or gods/ to the natural environment. It also provides a way of transmitting these guidelines to the next generation (enculturation).
Enculturation: a 'lens' through which the individual perceives and understands the world that he inhabits and learns how to live with it. The group or context itself.
Challenges to definitions/ challenges to define cultures:
Multiple levels of culture
(Cross-)cultural psychology
'Humans seek meaning in their actions, and the shared ideas that make up cultures provide the kinds of meanings that people can derive from their experiences. Cultural meanings are thus entangling with the ways that the mind operates, and we cannot consider the mind separate from its culture.' --> quote from the author of the textbook, he is clearly a relativist
Universality vs cultural variability
Whether a process is universal or culturally variable often depends on the level of definition. Abstract definitions generally lead to evidence supporting universality. Concrete definitions generally lead to evidence supporting variability.
Degrees of universality--> zie bb voor model
Cultural dimensions theory: cultures can be distinguished according to five dimensions:
Theoretical constructions: generalizations: groups also vary in homogeneity. Individual differences/ layers within cultures.
Socio-Economic Status
SES also has cultural implications! Interaction with culture and specifically relevant for health.
Differences in health behaviours within western cultures:
Poverty: socioeconomic level influences many variables that impact development and health in children (parental stress, neighbourhood risk, access to health care, social capital, financial investment).
Acquiring culture: cultural norms (and cultural differences!) are created through different ways of socialization. In general: when you are born, you will learn it. Because we are born open to learning any culture. Younger children across cultures should be relatively similar because there had been relatively little socialization. Older adults should show greater cultural differences between cultures due to more socialization. Cultural differences increase with age.
Parenting: Effects of parenting generally studied under Baumrind's typology:
Which is best? Studies usually show authoritative parenting to yield best results in for instance school achievement, and perceived parental warmth. But some suggest the typology is laden with Western notions of development! Many other cultures commonly have a strict, parent-centred parenting style; but these do not fit neatly into Baumrind's "authoritarian" style. In many Asian cultures, parenting style changes according to child's stage of development. There is more explicit communication of parental warmth in Western societies, but more implicit communication of it in Asian societies. "Authoritarian" style fails to capture nuances of culture-specific notions of parenting styles (eg jiao xun or training, in Chinese parenting).
Universality of life stages
Terrible two's = a developmental milestone in the West. Important for children to assert autonomy and individuality. Serves as a foundation for future mature relationships. But this developmental stage is not seen universally. Some cultures view noncompliance as immaturity, not a step toward personal growth.
Adolescent rebellion = a developmental milestone considered by Western researches to be natural. Assumed to be due to hormonal changes in puberty. Characterized by disobedience, delinquency, and defiance of authority. But examining ethnographies of 175 pre-industrialized societies revealed that over half of them did not associate adolescence with antisocial behaviour.
Sensitive period: span of an organism's life when it can gain a new skill relatively easily. Skill acquisition subsequent to this becomes much more difficult. Evident across many different species, across many domains. Not applicable to all domains of learning in humans but applies to language and culture acquisition.
Migrant development: immigrant stress: many problems that make immigrants develop more poorly. Important sources of stress and health problems: poverty, discrimination, loyalty conflicts, trauma (depending on reasons to leave original country), homesickness, etc.
Immigrant paradox: despite lower SES, immigrant adolescents are less likely to have behavioural psychological, or health problems than national adolescents. Mean immigrant SES markedly lower than that of nationals. Second generation decline: effect becomes smaller. Eventually, convergence or even surpassing in negative direction. Potential explanations:
In Europe: only in sociocultural adaptation, not psychological adaptation!
Netherlands: despite markedly lower SES, immigrants tend to perform as well or better than their national peers. Second generation decline. Smaller effects than in the USA or Canada.
Downward assimilation: where will most immigrant adolescents live? They start to assimilate toward the wrong groups when they live in "bad neighbourhoods".
Segmented assimilation: effects of acculturation depend on context. Assimilation may have positive effects in an affluent context. However, most immigrants do not arrive in an affluent context. Assimilation into the lower segment of society, combined with a feeling of discrimination adverse effects. Selective assimilation may help.
Dealing with differences
Colour-blind approach | Multicultural approach |
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Error of ethnocentrism: Recognize our own ethnocentrism: perceiving one's own culture as standard of comparison. The tendency to judge people from other cultures by comparing them to your own culture.
Current research practice: selection bias
Who is WEIRD: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic
WEIRD countries only make up about 16% of the world's population! Evidence for WEIRD thinking has been shown by contrasting:
WEIRD group even appears to be particularly unusual, with differences appearing in visual perception; fairness; cooperation; spatial reasoning; categorization and inferential induction; moral reasoning; reasoning styles; self-concepts and related motivations; heritability of IQ. But also, our main source of information.
(Cross-)cultural psychology aims to better understand the full distributions of human psychology and the implications of cross-cultural variation. Learning about cross-cultural variation helps us to interact in a globalizing world, especially in multicultural societies.
Goals:
Approaches: Quantitative and qualitative
Practical aspects
Methodological equivalence: how easily can you apply measures across cultures?
Extensive piloting and validation!
Measurement quality: reliability and validity
Central themes:
Universality of a specific trait: often: looking across groups (remember the levels of universality!)
Influence of a specific trait on thinking & behaviour: often: looking with in (multiple) groups
Studying a culture as a whole rather than individuals: often: looking at cultural messages (news, media, etc) for specific traits
Comparisons: what are the right contrasts: depends on the specific research question.
Instruments: surveys, experiments (behavioural/physiological), observation, interviews, economic games, archival work, field work, etc.
Questionnaire translation: process of forward and backward translation to achieve 'equilibrium'. Full process:
Response biases:
What to do?
Reference group effects: the response to questions may depend on the group that one is using for reference. For example: how does one respond to the item "I am tall?" To control for this, it's better to use objective and concrete measures, by providing specific scenarios as questions, asking quantitative questions and/or using behavioural and physiological measures.
Deprivation effects: the tendency for people (or cultures) to value what they would like not what they have. No clear solution for this bias, except to interpret results with caution.
Experimental methods
Important: culture is not a trait that can be manipulated! As usual:
The dependent variable can come from behavioural responses (ratings, correct answers, etc) and physiological measures (brain, hormones, heart rate, etc).
Findings are statistically evaluated. Aim to work in a hypothesis-testing, theoretically grounded way!
Unpackaging culture
Unpackaging= identifying underlying variables that create cultural differences
Three steps:
Culture-specific method 1: situations sampling: how do people respond to situations regularly experienced.
A two-step method:
This allows for two types of analyses:
Culture-specific method 2: cultural priming
Entails inducing cultural ways of thinking that were not enculturated by the participant's cultural group. Assumes that while some ways of thinking may be different between Cultures A and B, Cultures A's way of thinking may still be present, but to a limited extent. When cultural ideas are activated that actually fit more into another culture (priming), then people start to think more in ways of that culture.
Mixed methods: no single study design is perfect, due to alternative explanations and methodological flaws. The best way to counter such problems is to use multiple, differing methods. Using multiple methods to replicate findings while disproving alternative accounts provides the most compelling evidence.
Interpretation bias
Cross-cultural health research
Many challenges: language barrier in an already complicated field, limitations of practical settings, eg membership in a cultural group is not always clear-cut; types and prevalence of disorders may be different, eg specific psychiatric syndromes; health communication is more difficult across cultures; translation, adaptation and validation of measures is time-consuming and costly, yet even more necessary in health contexts.
Summary
Je vertrek voorbereiden of je verzekering afsluiten bij studie, stage of onderzoek in het buitenland
Study or work abroad? check your insurance options with The JoHo Foundation
Je vertrek voorbereiden of je verzekering afsluiten bij studie, stage of onderzoek in het buitenland
Study or work abroad? check your insurance options with The JoHo Foundation
Cultural variation: differences between cultural groups. Cultures are fluid and dynamic, in most cases changing over time. But cultural ideas and norms don't necessarily emerge to address universal problems. Rathe result from cultural learning. Example: fashion, tertiary level.
Sources of cultural variation: ecological geographical differences are important and can lead to far-reaching consequences. Eg availability of food sources, ease of living in specific habitats, interdependence among groups, etc. Local ecologies influence cultural values and norms and can lead to cultural in different ways: proximal causes vs distal causes and evoked culture vs transmitted culture.
Proximal causes: influenced that have direct and immediate effects. - eg when Spanish conquistadors invading had good armour, allowing a quick victory over the Incans, who lacked such technology.
Distal causes: initial differences that lead to effects over long periods of time. - eg because of sufficient food, people could devote their time to nonfood activities such as creating tools.
Evoked culture: specific environmental conditions evoke specific responses from (all) people within that environment, becoming part of a culture. - eg acting in an intimidating manner when your children are being threatened.
Transmitted culture: cultural information passed on or learned via social transmission or modeling. - eg copying behaviour, clothing, aspects of etiquette, etc, from food-finding to social interaction.
Evoked and transmitted culture are not always clearly separated! Eg more emphasis on physical attractiveness due to greater parasite prevalence, vs parents teaching their children to pay attention to physical attractiveness. Transmitted culture is arguably always involved in maintaining cultural norms, even when evoked cultural responses are also present. Evoked culture based on ecological pressures alone cannot explain cultural variation. Transmitted culture represents situation-specific AND group-specific knowledge.
Transmission of cultural information, how is information transferred
Parallel with biological evolution, the main mechanisms are natural selection: increasing proportions of traits that confer a survival advantage; sexual selection: increasing proportion of traits that confer reproductive advantages. Sometimes conflicting!
Cultural evolution
Similarities with biological evolution: Ideas can be persistent (high survival rate) and ideas can be more prone to being passed around (reproduced more).
Differences: cultural ideas can be transmitted horizontally among peers, not only vertically across generations.
What makes ideas interesting and sticky?
Information going viral: memes: agents of cultural transmission --> shared jokes/context
Communicable ideas
In order to be easily shared, information might be especially useful or informative, elicit an emotional response, be socially desirable, and are simple to communicate. Eg instructional videos (life hacks), messages of common interest (risk of rumours), messages confirming your shared values or messages that are not too complex. The stronger the emotion, the more likely people are to pass a story on.
Ideas generally spread within social networks, leading to clustering of attitudes: Dynamic social impact theory. An account for the origin of culture: norms develop among those who communicate regularly.
Persisting ideas: ideas that have a small number of counterintuitive elements persist longer. Minimal, but noticeable violations of expectation. Characteristics of many religious narratives as well as myth/storytelling. Supported by the research into 'catchiness' of fairy tales: the unknown/unpopular fairy tales have to many of not enough violations of expectation.
In recent decades, cultures have been changing and evolving in several ways:
Changes are usually slow, and some cultural qualities persist for far longer than their initial usefulness! Persistence is an effect of pre-existing structure: evolution of culture departs from and is based on, some initial cultural state, such initial cultural states will limit the manner in which future cultural variation takes shape.
Facilitated by pluralistic ignorance(= tendency to collectively misinterpret the thoughts that underlie other people's behaviour. When everyone (incorrectly) assumes everyone else in favour of some cultural norm, they will comply with the norm, thus perpetuating the culture.
Part 1 key points
Thoughts of as mostly universally functions! However, there are cross-cultural differences in the basic phenomena of:
Sensing vs perceiving
Sensation: input through the senses: visions/seeing, auditions/hearing, haptic sense/touching, olfactory sense/smelling, gustatory sense/taste and more.
Perception: the conscious percept or experience
Enculturation in perception
Previous exposure leads to changes processing of new information: eg increased sensitivity. Predictability: if you know what to expect, infrequently perceived things become more interesting, but processed less successfully. This applies to faces, weather, colours, tastes, music, etc.
Statistical learning
Bottom-up & top-down: cognitive processes interact with basic sensory mechanisms to produce a conscious percept. Top-down modulation: internally driven attention. Bottom-up processing: externally driven attention.
New categories in sound
Different cultures lead to different 'auditory environments'. Music: scale notes make up common melodies, but tone is continuous! Music scales are different in different cultures. Your auditory environment teaches you what is normal and what is deviant.
Developing structure in perception: Infants are developing rhythmic categories. Study with violations of structures, with babies they used looking time: they can hear the violations in structure. Rhythmic biases are enculturated!
Auditory environment
Language: The rhythm of composed music caries for languages, even without lyrics!
Normal pairwise variability index: nPVI: calculates the duration variability of successive vocalic duration: how variable is rhythm in speech? The higher the nPVI value, the larger the contrast of successive duration. In Dutch, German and English there are more variations in the language between long and short syllables.
Analytic and holistic thinking appear to be culturally variant, potentially based on philosophical traditions (Cf. Greek vs Chinese).
Analytic thinkinginvolves focus on objects and attributes, objects perceives as independent from contexts, taxonomic categorization, more prevalent in individualistic societies.
Holistic thinkinginvolves attending to the relations among objects, prediction an object's behaviour on the basis of those relationships, thematic categorization, more prevalent in collectivistic societies.
Change blindness: after exposure to the images (US city-scape and Japanese city-scape), both Japanese and US viewers increase their ability to detect changes in visual scenes. Perceptual environments can induce specific patterns of attention!
Analytic & holistic approaches: relationship between figure and ground (field), focal and contextual information. Field dependence: linking/integrating an object into its context, difficultly to see separate elements. Holistic thinkers perceive a scene as an integrated whole (more field dependence). Analytic thinkers are able to separate objects from each other (field independence).
Field dependence in the lab
The rod-and-frame task: is the line vertical? If given control to operate the machine, Americans became more confident as compared to Chinese.
Fish and background task: Americans were unaffected by background manipulation. Japanese noticed more errors with new background, they were not affected by absent background.
Focal attention: attention operationalized as gaze direction
Reasoning and thinking (effected by analytic and holistic thinker)
Rule-based reasoning vs resemblance-based reasoning
Understanding the behaviour of others
Analytic thinkers are more likely to make dispositional attributions even when contextual/environmental constraints are made explicit. Holistic thinkers are more likely to pay attention to contextual information and make situational attribution. Tendencies develop with age: differences between Indian & American adults *much* larger for children. Indian adults show reversed attribution error.
Tolerance for contradictions
Other influences on thinking: talking (communication styles)
Vocalizing thoughts helps Westerns, but not Easterners. Interpretation: speech forces focus which facilitates analytic thinking but interferes with holistic thinking.
Language and thought
All spoking communication contains both implicit (ie nonverbal) and explicit information.
East-Asian cultures tend to be high-context cultures, Western cultures tend to be low-context cultures. People in high context cultures have a harder time ignoring implicit information than people in low context cultures.
Linguistic relativity
Whorfian hypothesis: Strong version = language determinesthought: without access to the right words, people cannot have certain kinds of thoughts --> Largely rejected.
Weak version = language influencesthought: having access to certain words influences the kinds of thoughts that one has (Much controversy surrounding this claim)
Effects of language on perception and cognition
Part 2 key points
Ecological variability (geological/social) is related to cultural differences. Although cultures can change, it appears that superficial (tertiary) aspects might change more readily, while underlying shared values persist for a long time. Cultural differences also impact psychological functions thought to be basic/universal measurable in the lab! Difference may be related to language, to the environment, to cultural importance, etc
Notes of the lectures for Cross-Cultural Psychology of Health and Illness (CCPHI) 2018/2019. If you want a word document of the notes, leave a comment and I can send them to you! :)
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