Jun 23, 2021 · The state of the mental health system is affected by cultural values, and it is essential to normalize seeking help in more cultures. A …
Dec 10, 2003 · Cultural psychology is an interdisciplinary field that unites psychologists, anthropologists, linguists, and philosophers for a common pursuit: the study of how cultural meanings, practices, and institutions influence and reflect individual human psychologies. It is not a freestanding area within psychology, and most cultural psychologists would like to keep it …
Jul 27, 2020 · Culture-Bound Disorders. In medicine and medical anthropology, a culture-bound syndrome, culture-specific syndrome, or folk illness is a combination of psychiatric (brain) and somatic (body) symptoms that are considered to be a recognizable disease only within a specific society or culture. There are no objective biochemical or structural ...
Aug 21, 2009 · Koro. Koro is a psychological disorder characterized by delusions of penis shrinkage and retraction into the body, accompanied by panic and fear of dying. This delusion is rooted in Chinese metaphysics and cultural practices. The disorder is associated with the belief that unhealthy or abnormal sexual acts (such as sex with prostitutes, masturbation, or even …
In psychology departments across the country, a growing number of psychologists are doing something called “cultural psychology.”. As they unpack their experiences and observations, unveil their theories and methods, and unfurl their often surprising results, an air of mystery collects around them. Who are these people?
Culture shapes individual minds and behaviors as much as the minds and behaviors shape the culture. As a result, “People are active cultural agents, rather than passive recipients of cultural influences,” said social psychologist Chi-Yue Chiu, University of Illinois. “They create, apply, reproduce, transform, and transmit their cultural routines in ...
Steven Heine, a social psychologist at the University of British Columbia, agreed that the road to basic psychological theory may be paved with cultural differences. “Cultural differences can be informative to mainstream psychological theorizing in the same way that brain injuries are to neuroscience.
One implication of the cyclical, transactional relationship between cultures and psyches is that culture is not an independent variable. Culture may predict, but it does not “cause.”. A second implication is that neither cultures nor psychologies exist independent of each other.
Jeffrey Sanchez-Burks, a social psychologist at the University of Michigan Business School, underscored how strange this group is. “People often describe cultural differences in terms of the exotic other, but rarely talk about why Americans are the way they are.
Psychological anthropologist Alan Fiske, University of California, Los Angeles, often recommends a lengthy stint of fieldwork, replete with language learning and participant-observation. “Not interviewing, not videotaping, but genuine participant observation [is the key],” Fiske said.
Culture-bound syndromes are generally limited to specific societies or culture areas and are localized, folk, diagnostic categories that frame coherent meanings for certain repetitive, patterned, and troubling sets of experiences and observations. There is seldom a one-to-one equivalence of any culture-bound syndrome with a DSM diagnostic entity.
Psychological disorders considered specific to particular ethnocultural groups because of distinct cultural factors influencing the etiology, meaning, expression, and for treatment of the disorder are referred to as culture-bound activities. The term is used in contrast to those psychological disorders considered to be “universal.”.
Koro, the fear that one’s sexual organ is shrinking or withdrawing into one’s body, assumes a different meaning when considered within the context of Chinese cultural views regarding the balance of yin (female) and yang (male) forces in the etiology of disease and the promotion of health. The loss of semen, whether through masturbation, frequent intercourse, or problematic anatomy, assumes a different meaning and consequence in Chinese society than it does in the West. The disorder cannot be extracted from its Chinese cultural context and interpreted in Western society as simply a delusion that occurs in hysterical personalities. The explanatory power of the latter is limited and biased because context is excluded. Imagine the reverse: Based upon treating more than 1,000 Yoruban (Nigeria) women, a Yoruban folk healer considers a severely agitated “depressive” episode in a Western middle-class housewife to be asinwin (i.e., a Yoruban disorder often found in women), and suggests that violations of ancestral spiritual taboos have caused the problem.
Cultural disorders (culture-bound syndromes) are mental disorders or quirks which seem to affect a single cultural group and are, therefore, often unknown outside of their own regions. We have covered some cultural disorders in the past but this is the first list to deal with them exclusively.
Couvade syndrome is a medical/mental condition which “involves a father experiencing some of the behavior of his wife at near the time of childbirth , including her birth pains, postpartum seclusion, food restrictions, and sex taboos”.
Ghost Sickness. Ghost sickness is a culture-bound syndrome which some Native American tribes believe to be caused by association with the dead or dying. It is sometimes associated with witchcraft. It is considered to be a psychotic disorder of Navajo origin.
When Chi-yue Chiu, a professor of psychology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, was pursuing his PhD in social psychology at Columbia University, he focused primarily on how individuals make decisions and influence their reality through their own actions. Since then, Chiu said, his conceptualization of the relationship between values ...
To test these findings, Keller and colleague Bettina Lamm (University of Osnabrueck) employed Mischel’s famous marshmallow experiment, a measure of self-control in which children are promised two sweets if they can resist eating the first for a short period of time.
Cross-cultural psychology analyzes characteristics and behavior across different cultural groups, with an interest in variation as well as human universals. Cultural psychology involves comparison as well, but has been described as more focused on psychological processes within a particular culture. In another approach, indigenous psychology, ...
While happiness seems to be one of the most cross-culturally recognizable emotions in terms of individual expression, culture can influence how one thinks about happiness. Research indicates that people in different cultures vary in how much value they place on happiness and how much they focus on their own well-being.
Cross-cultural research demonstrates that experimental effects, correlations, or other results that are observed in one cultural context —for example, the tendency of Western participants to rate their abilities as better-than-average—do not always appear in the same way, or at all, in others.
While various definitions are used, culture can be understood as the collection of ideas and typical ways of doing things that are shared by members of a society and have been passed down through generations. These can include norms, rules, and values as well as physical creations such as tools.
While some mating preferences, such as a desire for kindness and physical attractiveness in a partner , appear in many if not all cultures, preferences also differ in some ways across cultures—like the importance placed on humor or other traits.
The psychological findings that get the most attention are disproportionately derived from a fraction of the world’s population. Some scientists call this relatively well-examined subgroup of human societies WEIRD: that is, Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. As long as people who live in countries that meet these descriptors are the primary subjects of psychological research—and that has long been the case—it will often be difficult for psychologists to determine whether an observation applies to people in general or only to those in certain cultural contexts. Increasing the representation of people from diverse cultures in research is therefore a goal of many psychologists.
In cross-cultural psychology, an analytic cognitive style roughly describes a tendency to focus on a salient object, person, or piece of information (as in an image or a story) independently from the context in which it appears. A holistic cognitive style, in contrast, involves a tendency to focus more on the broader context ...
In psychology, culture refers to a set of ideas and beliefs which give people sense of shared history and can guide our behavior within society. Culture manifests itself in our language, art, daily routines, religion and sense of morality, among other forms, and is passed down from generation to generation.
Culture manifests itself in our language, art, daily routines, religion and sense of morality, among other forms, and is passed down from generation to generation. Of course, within each culture we often see the influence of other cultures, such as that of other European languages on the English vocabulary, along with wide cultural variations ...
To understand psychological differences amongst cultures, we must first define what we refer to as "culture" and how this can differ from simply the "place" in which we live. In psychology, culture refers to a set of ideas and beliefs which give people sense of shared history and can guide our behavior within society. Culture manifests itself in our language, art, daily routines, religion and sense of morality, among other forms, and is passed down from generation to generation.
Individualistic societies focus on needs of the individual person and encourage each person to strive to achieve their own potential, often in competition with, or sometimes to the detriment of, a person's peers.
Mary Ainsworth developed the Strange Situation test (Ainsworth and Bell, 1970) which built on the work of John Bowlby to demonstrate the different types of attachment to the caregiver that infants experience, including secure, anxious-resistant and anxious-avoidant attachments. 4 Such attachments have been widely recognised and are still used in understanding parent-child relationships today. However, in the Strange Situation test, Ainsworth's subjects were from middle class, Caucasian backgrounds - a demographic which struggles to represent the cultural makeup of the US, still less other countries.
Cross-cultural analyses of psychology studies has also had implications for the way levels of intelligence are measured among populations. We might believe that intelligence can be measured objectively, and in the West, the Intelligence Quotient (IQ) test is commonly used to quantify and compare people's intelligence.
One of the key distinctions between national cultures, which can influence the choices that people make, is that of individualistic versus collectivist societies: 1 Individualistic Societies#N#Individualistic societies focus on needs of the individual person and encourage each person to strive to achieve their own potential, often in competition with, or sometimes to the detriment of, a person's peers. It emphasises the importance of self-reliance and give each individual the freedom to be oneself, nurturing the idea of self expression.#N#Many countries in the West, such as the US, UK and other Western European countries are widely considered to be individualistic societies. 2 Collectivistic Societies#N#In contrast to individualistic societies, collectivistic societies emphasize the importance of cooperation - working for the benefit of the collective - and assume that societies can only improve by a group effort amongst all members of the community.#N#Collectivistic behavior may see altruistic acts or favors being carried out without the expectation of a reward other than that which benefits society. For example, a person may work extra hours without additional reward to fix a well, knowing that it will help to satisfy their fellow villagers' need for water.#N#Collectivism is generally found in Eastern cultures - in countries such as Japan - and also in smaller groups such as Kibbutz farming communities in Israel, where each member works towards the town's collective goals.
Cultural psychology is not just about What, but, more importantly, Whyand How. It not only uncovers the diversity of human cognition and behavior, but also provides theoretical and empirical insights into such diversity and in so doing greatly advances our general understanding of human cognition and behavior.
To some extent, group-level analysis is inherent both in theory and by design when two or more groups are involved in an empirical study in cultural psychology. For researchers who truly value multiple levels of analysis, this is obviously an important limitation.
Because culture is such a rich vein of information, counseling practice is inevitably embedded in multiple sociocultural realities and contexts. As such, the concept of culture-bound syndromes is important for counselors because minority clients, particularly those who are recent immigrants, may bring with them their own indigenous patterns and conceptions of mental illness into the counseling process and relationship . That is, counseling in general, and mental illness in particular, are likely perceived, experienced, and interpreted differently by the client than by counselors. Counselors thus face the challenge of negotiating with their client a diagnosis in the assessment process, which may occur in a number of ways. Some may, for example, share with the client’s view of the illness as a culture-bound syndrome and offer interventions that are consistent with the folk medicine treatment. Others may empathize with the client’s subjective complaint but decide to educate the client about the causes and nature of the illness as they perceive it. Still others may discount the client’s experience of illness as merely exotic, given the imprecise nature of the concept of culture-bound syndrome. The assessment process, the final diagnosis, as well as the interventions are thus dependent, to a considerable extent, upon the multicultural awareness, knowledge, and skills of counselors.
Defined as a network of domain-specific knowledge structures shaped by members of a given cultural group, culture is internalized into each individual’s self-concept and functions as a template to guide one’s expectations, perceptions, and interpretations.
These syndromes can be categorized into the following major definitional iterations: 1 A mental illness that is not attributable to an identifiable organic cause, is often recognized locally as an illness, and does not correspond to a recognized Western medical category 2 An illness that is not attributable to an identifiable organic cause, is recognized within local culture as an illness, and resembles a Western disease category but may lack some symptoms considered as salient in Western culture 3 A discrete disease entity not yet recognized in Western culture 4 A nondescript illness that may or may not have an organic cause and may correspond to a subset of a Western disease category 5 Illnesses in the idiomatic rhetoric category that represent culturally accepted explanatory mechanisms but may not correspond with Western idioms and, in Western culture, may suggest culturally inappropriate thinking and perhaps delusions or hallucinations 6 Illnesses in the category of generalized culture-bound syndromes that are characterized by behaviors such as trance, hearing, seeing, or communicating with the dead or spirits, which may or may not be seen as pathological within local culture but could indicate psychosis, delusions, or hallucinations in Western culture 7 Unreal syndromes that allegedly occur in a given cultural setting, which, in fact, does not exist