Week 1: Course overview, research methods & development
Health & Illness
Positive concept of health and the negative concepts of disease/illness/sickness are
differently defined in different cultures, because there are influences from within the
culture such as:
- What constitutes as health or illness
o Culture specific illness
- What causes health or illness
o Some culture take personalistic views, while western medicine is generally
mechanistic
- What should be done for health or against illness
o Habits in term of seeking healthcare
o Acceptable healthcare practices
Culture: What is it?
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 for example:
How to view the world, how to experience emotions, how to behave in relation to other
people, believes in supernatural forces or god, and the natural environment.
It also provides a way of transmitting these guidelines to the next generation
(enculturation).
➔ A “lens” through which the individual perceives and understand the world that he
inhabits and learns how to live with it
➔ The group or context itself
But there are some challenges to these definitions, because the cultural boundaries are
not distinct and so they are often unclear. But also the cultures are dynamic and change
over time and there are as many variations within cultures as between cultures. The latter
suggests that there are problem with stereotypes (person related variables are generally
continuous and distributed) and the artificial or false dichotomies should be avoided.
There are three different levels of culture (you can compare this to peeling an onion!):
- Tertiary level: explicit manifest culture, visible to the outsider, such as social rituals,
traditional dress, national cuisine, festival occasions and so on. This is also called the
façade of a culture
- Secondary level: underlying shared beliefs and rules, known to the insiders but rarely
shard with the outsiders. These are also called the social norms.
- Primary or deepest level: Rules that are known to all, obeyed by all, but implicit and
generally out of awareness (hidden, stable and resistant to change). These are also called
the roots
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, (Cross-) cultural psychology
The absolutist approach states that psychological phenomena are the same across
cultures, but only the processes and behavior vary. Whereas the relativist approach states
that psychological phenomena only exist within the context of a culture. If you combine
these approaches you would say that psychological processes are shaped by experience,
but all humans share the same biological constraints.
General psychology focuses on the universals and (sometimes) tries to control for
cultural variation, whereas cultural psychology focuses on these cultural variation in
terms of the psychological consequences of the culture.
This means that cultural psychology studies the different meaning systems origination
from different environments. While it assumes that mind and culture are entangled and
that thoughts are shaped by contexts.
Universality vs. cultural variability
Whether a process is universal or culturally variable often depends n the level of
definition. On the one hand abstract definition generally leads to evidence supporting
universality, while on the other hand concrete definitions generally lead to evidence
supporting variability.
Degrees of universality
- Nonuniversal (cultural invention): are
cognitive tools not found in all cultures
- Existential universal: are cognitive tools
found in all cultures that serve different
functions and is available to some degree in
different cultures
- Functional universal: are cognitive tools
found in all culture that serve the same
function, but is accessible to different
degrees in different cultures
- Accessibility universal: are cognitive tools
that serve the same functions and is
accessible tot the same degree.
Cultural dimensions theory
Hofstede (2001) claims that cultures can be distinguished with five dimensions:
1. Individualism – collectivism
2. Uncertainty avoidance (The way people deal with ambiguity)
3. Power distance (hierarchical)
4. Long-term – short-term orientation
5. Masculinity – femininity (distinction of the gender roles)
This system is a dominant system in explaining a culture, but there are also others that
have different dimensions.
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, Socio-economic status
Even SES has an cultural implications. For example think about how it interacts with
the culture and specifically why it’s relevant for (mental) health. Studies show that lower
SES predicts the likelihood of smoking and higher alcohol consumption. Contrary, a
higher SES predicts more balanced and healthy food intake.
Furthermore SES influences many other variables that impact the development and
health in children. Think about the following variables: parental stress, neighborhood
risk, access to healthcare, social capital, and financial investments.
Acquiring culture
Cultural norms (and differences) are created through different ways of socialization. The
reason for this is that we are born “open” to learning any culture. Younger children
across cultures should be relatively similar, because there has been relatively little
socialization and older adults should show greater cultural differences between cultures
due to more socializations. This suggest that cultural differences increase with age.
Parental socializations
According to Baumrind (1997) there are types of parenting styles:
- Authoritarian: high demands, strict rules, little open-child dialogue and parent-
centered
- Authoritative: high expectations of maturity, parent-child dialogue about
understanding feelings, independence encourages (withing limits) parental warmth
associations, and child-oriented
- Permissive: lots of dialogue, few limits/controls and lots of parental warmth
According to most studies the authoritative parenting style yield the best results in for
example school achievement and perceived parental warmth, but some suggest the
typology is laden with Western notions of development (which makes sense!!). Many
other cultures commonly have a strict, parent-centered parenting style, but these do not
fit neatly into the “authoritarian” style describe above. This is because in many Asian
cultures, parenting style changes according to the child’s stage of development. There
is also more explicit communication of parental warmth in Western societies, but more
implicit communication of this in Asian societies. Furthermore the Authoritarian style
fails to capture the nuances of culture specific notions of parenting styles.
Universality of life stages
There is something called the “terrible twos”, which is a developmental milestone in
the west. It’s important for children to assert autonomy and individuality and serves as
foundation for future mature relationships. But this developmental stage is not seen
universally, in some cultures noncompliance is seen as immaturity and not a step
towards personal growth.
Another developmental milestone in western countries is the adolescents rebellion.
Which is assumed to be due to hormonal changes in puberty and characterized by
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,disobedience, delinquency and defiance of authority. But examining ethnographies of
pre-industrialized societies revealed that over half of them did not associate adolescence
with antisocial behavior.
The last described period is the sensitive period, which is a span of an organism’s life
when it can gain new skills relatively easily. This is marked by a period of skill
acquisition subsequent to this period that becomes much more difficult. It’s evident
across many different species, across many domains. Furthermore it is not applicable to
all domains of learning in humans, but applies to language and culture acquisition.
(Im)migrant
There are many different factors that make immigrants develop more poorly, such as:
poverty, discrimination, loyalty conflicts, trauma, homesickness… These are all
important sources of stress and health problems.
Immigrant paradox
The immigrant paradox states that despite lower SES, immigrant adolescents are less
likely to have behavioral, psychological or health problems than national adolescents.
There is a second generation decline of the effect, it becomes smaller, which in the end
could surpass to the negative direction.
Potential explanations for this paradox might be: optimism, cultural maintenance,
“othering”, measurement invariance. And family obligations (which are related to more
positive well-being and adjustment, many help (such as pride & commitment) but it
could also be harmful (such as work and acculturation conflicts).
Error of ethnocentrism
It’s perceiving one’s own culture as standard of comparison. This result in a tendency
to judge people from other culture by comparing them to your own culture.
For example almost 96% of the psychology research is done by people with a western,
educated, industrialized, rich and democratic background, but these people represent
only 12% of the world population. Furthermore 99% of first authors come from western
universities!
Research methods
As usual in psychology there are different types of methods to research something.
There is always a distinction between quantitative and qualitative approaches. While the
main goals are to describe, explain, predict and change behavior.
There is something called the methodological equivalence which asks the question how
easily can you apply measures across different cultures?
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, To be sure a measurement is correct there are two construct which need to be good /
proper: reliability (reproducibility, replicability or precision) and validity (internal,
external, construct or ecological validity).
Central themes in cross cultural psychology are:
- Universality of a specific trait
- Influence of a specific trait on thinking & behavior
- Studying a culture as a whole rather than the individuals
Response biases
Response biases are ways that people answer questions during a measurement. These
biases are influence by culture and thus important to keep in mind while studying cross-
cultural psychology. Some response biases are described below:
- Extremity bias: only answering the extremes on a questionnaire (such as strongly
(dis)agree)
- Acquiescence bias: Always answering “yes” even though some question are contrary
- Moderacy bias: Answering the middle answer
The question is how you can prevent or influence these biases so that they don’t appear
at al (or to recognize them). Ways to do this are: Forcing choice answers (but nuances
are lost, while its arbitrary), standardization, and reverse-scoring items.
Another thing to always keep in mind while making questions is that they must be as
objective and concrete as possible, because otherwise it might be unclear what the
question refers to.
Deprivation effect is the tendency for people (or culture) to value what they would like
and not what they have. There is no clear solution for this bias, except to interpret results
with caution.
Experimental methods
It’s important to note that culture is not a trait that can be manipulated. This means that
you always focus (=dependent variable) on behavioral responses or physiological
measure.
Unpacking culture
Unpacking means that you identify underlying variables that create cultural differences.
You can do this by following three steps:
1. Identify a theoretically viable variable that can explain a cultural difference
2. Confirm cultural difference in the proposed underlying variable
3. Show that underlying variable is related to cultural difference in question
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, Culture specific method #1 : situation sampling
This is a two-step method where (1) participants from each culture generate situations
during which they experience some psychological phenomenon and (2) another group
of participants assesses full complied list of situations generated by both cultures ins
step 1.
This results into two types of possible analyses: You can either examine culture
differences in how participants respond to the same situations or you could examine
cultural differences in the types of experiences/situations that people have.
Culture specific method #2: cultural pairing
This method entails inducing cultural ways of thinking that were not enculturated by the
participant’s cultural group. It assumes that while some ways of thinking may be
different between Cultures A and B, Culture A’s way of thinking may still be present
to some degree in Culture B.
For example priming individualism by forcing participants to use first-person singular
pronouns (I, me) vs priming collectivism by forcing the use of first personal plural
pronouns (we, us).
➔ But the best way to tackle a problem is by using different types of methods and to
replicate findings while disproving alternative accounts.
Interpretation biases
- Belief perseverance effect: holding on to your views in the face of conflicting evidence
- Self-fulfilling prophecy: expectations lead to thinking you see confirmatory evidence
- Availability bias: overestimate of frequency of occurrence of salient events
- Representativeness bias: faulty categorizing based on inaccurate features
- Fundamental attribution error: overestimating internal causes of behavior (influence
of personality) and underestimating the situational context.
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,Week 2: Cultural transmission, Cross-cultural cognition
Always keep in mind when talking about differences in culture the theory of Hofstede
Cultural variation
We’re talking about the differences between these groups, considering that cultures are
fluid and dynamic and are changing over time., But culture ideas and norms don’t
necessarily emerge to address universal problems (for example think about fashion
within a culture, a tertiary phenomenon).
Sources of cultural variation
Of course there are ecological and geographical differences are important, and can lead
to far-reaching consequences. For example the availability of food sources, ease of
living in specific habitats can decide the interdependence among groups.
Local ecologies influence cultural values and norms, and can lead to cultural variation
in different ways:
- Proximal causes vs. distant causes
Proximal causes are influences that have direct and immediate effects, such as the
Spanish invading South America with guns (which the Incans didn’t have at the time
being). Whereas distal causes are initial differences that lead to effects over long periods
of time. Such as spending less time to gather food, means more time to spent on
technology and developing new kind of weapons
- Evoked culture vs. transmitted culture
Evoked culture is something that is biological decoded. A specific environmental
condition that evokes a specific response from all people within that environment.
Whereas transmitted culture is when cultural information is passed on or learned via
social transmission or modelling.
These aren’t always clearly separated from each other.! Transmitted culture is arguably
always involved in maintaining cultural norms, even when the evoked culture responses
are present. This means that evoked culture based on ecological pressure alone cannot
explain cultural variation. However the transmitted culture represents situation specific
and group-specific knowledge.
Transmission of cultural information
1. Ideas need to be retained
2. Ideas need to be passed on (the new generation, but also the generation that lives at
the moment: your peers)
What makes ideas interesting and sticky?
Memes are agents of cultural transmission (Dawkins), which basically means that
information is going viral. 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.
Ideas generally spread within social networks, leading to clustering of attitudes:
Dynamic social impact theory.
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, Ideas that have a small number of counterintuitive elements persist longer, but just
minimal and a noticeable violations of expectations. Which is characteristic of many
religious narratives.
How do cultures change?
In recent decades, cultures have been changing and evolving in several ways. Because
there are increasingly interconnected, individualistic and more intelligence.
We are more connected because we can transport easier (both physical and through the
internet), but there is also more tribalism (=modern populism) that want to return to
traditional cultures.
We get more individualistic, even in America this is happening (which already is a really
individualistic country). Reasons for this are increased suburbanization, more electronic
entertainment, less collective thinking because they haven’t fought for “your country”.
Longitudinal date suggest that IQ scores rise between 5 – 25 points per generation, but
it depends on which intelligence test, because some scores are dropping (such as
vocabulary, because people are reading less). Furthermore, people are getting more and
more education.
How do cultures persist?
Changes are usually slow, and some cultural qualities persist for far longer than their
initial usefulness. Persistence is an effect of the pre-existing structure, which is
facilitated by pluralistic ignorance (tendency to collectively misinterpret the thought
that underlie other people’s behavior). For example: when everyone (incorrectly)
assumes everyone else Is in favor of some cultural norm, they comply with the norm,
thus perpetuating the culture.
Cross-cultural differences in cognition and perception
Thought of as mostly universal functions. However, there are cross-cultural differences
in the basic phenomena of sensation (different modalities through different senses),
perceptual organization and cognition.
Sensing vs. perceiving
Sensation is just the input channels of information:
- Vision
- Audition
- Haptic sense (touching)
- Olfactory sense (smell)
- Gustatory sense (taste)
Enculturation in perception
Previous exposure lead to changed processing of new information (maybe you become
more sensitive for something). Furthermore, predictability: if you know what to expect,
infrequently perceived things become more interesting, but processed less successfully.
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,This applies to faces, weather, colors, tastes, music … Which is closely connected to
statistical learning, when things are rare, surprising and important you will notice more
differences.
Perception and thinking styles
Analytic and holistic thinking appear to be culturally variant, potentially based on
philosophical traditions. Where analytic thinking involves: focus on objects and
attributes, objects perceived as independent from contexts, taxonomic categorization,
rule-based reasoning (one rule decisions) and more prevalent in individualistic societies.
Whereas holistic thinking involves: attending to the relation among objects, predicting
an object’s behavior on the basis of those relationships, thematic categorization,
resemblance-based reasoning (majority features) and more prevalent in collectivistic
societies.
Study results suggest that perceptual environments can induce specific patterns of
attention.
Field dependence is how you see a certain image (or any other sense) in the context of
the whole picture, which shows what kind of thinking style you have.
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, Week 3: Emotions, motivation and acculturation stress
Emotions
Darwin: Emotions and emotional expressions are universal. Later on Ekman & Friesen
claimed that there are six basic emotions: Happiness, sadness, surprised, fear, disgust,
and anger (it’s commonly know how this experiment showed that there are 6 basic
emotions, some people in a tribe w/o contact to the rest of the world).
Assessing universality
There is a 7th emotion that’s quite universal, pride, but this emotion is not expressed in
the face, but more the total posture of oneself: open, breast upwards, slight smile, and
making oneself bigger. Even people that are born blind show this emotions.
What is an emotion
You could either see emotions according to the James Lange Theory and the Two Factor
theory. The James Lange theory claims that there is an outward stimulus, where you
body response to and this change in bodily activation you label as an emotion. So the
emotion depends on the cognition you have about your physical reactions. Furthermore
it claims that there would be no emotions if there is no physical reaction.
The two-factor theory of emotions claims that one emotion is not linked to a specific
physical reaction. This means that there is no direct relationship and it fully depends on
your interpretation of the whole situation and the physical reaction.
If James Lange is right and there is a direct link between physical reaction and the
emotion that was felt then there would be universal emotions. But if there was an
interpretation included than it means that’s less likely to be universal, because
interpretations differ from person to person.
Facial feedback hypothesis
The facial feedback hypothesis provides one reason to expect cultural variability,
because: We use our facial expression to infer our emotion state, which suggest that by
making a particular emotional expression, we can think that we are experiencing the
corresponding emotion (express the emotion = start feeling it). Which is true (according
to the pencil-in-mouth-experiment), so this suggest that our facial expression can affect
our emotional experiences. So if that’s true; our culture has rules regarding the intensity
of our expression (display rules), they may also affect the intensity of our emotional
expressions (expressing more = feeling more).
Display rules
Display rules indicate the intensity of expression and when an expression is appropriate.
Evidence for this: Emotions are recognized correctly more often in someone from the
same culture. And people’s brains show a greater response when seeing a fear
expression on the face of someone from the same culture.
The physiological response differs among people with different display rules (less
response cultures = less intense emotions and quick recovery). Results of this study
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