Cultural psychologyChapter 2Culture 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 languageTheory 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....

Cultural psychologyChapter 4Methods 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...

Cultural psychologyChapter 6Self 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...

Cultural psychologyChapter 8Motivation 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...

Cultural psychologyChapter 10Emotions 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...

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...