Trajectories of Cultural Identity Development of Young Immigrant People: The Impact of Family Practices

Drawing on socio-cultural and social representations theory this paper explores processes of cultural identity development in immigrant young people. Empirical data (that draws on the analysis of data from a much larger three-year research project) on experiences of Portuguese young people living in England, including the perspectives of their parents and teachers, is selectively used. Examples are used to explore processes of identity development through engagement in (i) situated activities (the doings), and (ii) symbolic activities (the meanings). It is argued that these activities involve complementary processes of mediation, which influence trajectories of identity development. This analytical distinction serves to illustrate that, for example, the situated activity of a young person translating for the family, on the one hand, involves the use of similar socio-cognitive resources as mediators (for instance, competency in the English and Portuguese language). On the other hand, translating as a symbolic activity, exposes different meanings of being Portuguese, which are used as resources in mediating cultural identity development. We explore how these different meanings are impacted by identities extended to the young person by significant others in relation to engagement with family practices.     

Towards a bio-psycho-social model of autobiographical memory

Self-awareness and identity are important cornerstones of thinking in social psychology. On the basis of current knowledge and theories from the social, cultural, and biological sciences, this paper attempts to outline an integrative approach to the phenomena of memory and reminiscence. Reference to psycho-dynamic argumentation is made in addition, where appropriate. The central topic to our argumentation is autobiographical memory, which we analyse according to evolutionary, neuroscientific, and cultural findings. The emotional context and the ontogenetic development of reminiscences (or memories directly relating to one's own self) provide the preliminary framework for an integrated view which includes interactions between the life span, brain development, the social and cultural environment, and genetic predispositions.     

Ethnic Minority Identity and Psychological Well-Being: The Mediating Role of Collective Self-Esteem

The study focuses on the psychological significance of ethnic minority identity among youth of Chinese origin living in the Netherlands. Relations of perceived group status and cultural values (allocentrism) with 3 measures of psychological well-being are examined. In addition, the mediating role of components of collective self-esteem (self-evaluation of ethnic in-group) is assessed. Collective self-esteem and psychological well-being depended more on perceived group status than on cultural values. Evidence was found primarily for the idea that components of collective self-esteem act as a mediating variable between perceived social status and psychological well-being. Different components function as mediators for different measures of well-being, suggesting that there are different mechanisms through which ethnic identity factors influence different aspects of psychological functioning.     

Towards a bio-psycho-social model of autobiographical memory

Self-awareness and identity are important cornerstones of thinking in social psychology. On the basis of current knowledge and theories from the social, cultural, and biological sciences, this paper attempts to outline an integrative approach to the phenomena of memory and reminiscence. Reference to psychodynamic argumentation is made in addition, where appropriate. The central topic to our argumentation is autobiographical memory, which we analyse according to evolutionary, neuroscientific, and cultural findings. The emotional context and the ontogenetic development of reminiscences (or memories directly relating to one's own self) provide the preliminary framework for an integrated view which includes interactions between the life span, brain development, the social and cultural environment, and genetic predispositions.     

Identity,Culture and Contestation: Social Identity as Cross-Cultural Theory

In this paper we explore the logic and implications of the social identity approach to group processes. The theory argues that the consequences of social identification for behaviour are not simple givens. Rather than making generalisations about the behaviour that flows from social identification, the theory makes the point that behaviour depends upon the way in which identities are defined. This emphasis upon the contents of social identities draws our attention to their construction and we pay particular attention to how group identities are made and remade in and through argument and social practice. We argue that attention to the dynamics of identity construction means that this perspective is respectful of culture and cultural difference and that the social identity approach therefore has considerable value in exploring the politics and practice of identity wherever group behaviour may be found. Moreover, we argue that the ubiquity of identity-related argument across cultures and contexts reflects the fact that group identity is a basis for social power.     

Toward a Social Psychology of Culture and Globalization: Some Social Cognitive Consequences of Activating Two Cultures Simultaneously

Despite the increased attention given to cultural phenomena in social psychology, the field has neglected issues related to globalization's cultural impacts. Meanwhile, opinions in the debates over these issues are divided, polarized, and often motivated by political and ideological commitments. Globalization has brought symbols of diverse cultures together and provided ample opportunities for the simultaneous activation of two or more cultural representations. Using our research on the social cognitive consequences of activating two cultural representations simultaneously as an example, we argue for constructing a social psychology of globalization that offers nuanced understandings of people's psychological responses to globalization. Although simultaneous activation of cultural representations does not determine an individual's cultural identity, it enlarges the felt distinctions between different identity options and magnifies the effects of identity choice. Furthermore, in situations that emphasize appropriating intellectual resources from diverse cultures to foster creativity, simultaneous activation of cultural representations may facilitate creative performance.     

Cultural psychology: a two-way path between mind and culture / Psicología cultural: un camino de ida y vuelta entre la mente y la cultura

Abstract

This brief introduction serves as an opening to the monographic issue on cultural psychology. We will begin this introduction by providing an overview of the main features of this branch of psychology. Heavily influenced by Vygotsky’s concept of mediation, cultural psychology centres on how we use different cultural tools or mediational artefacts to make sense of the world and guide our actions within it. On the basis of this approach, the nine articles of which this monograph is comprised are briefly introduced: articles which are eminently empirical in nature and which relate to areas such as creativity, collective memory, identity and developmental shifts, as well as migration and mobility in a globalized world.     

Gender attitudes, feminist identity, and body images among college women

Cultural forces influence body-image development in gender-contingent ways, such that women in our society possess more dysfunctional body-image attitudes than men do. However, few studies have examined how women’s body-image experiences relate to their own gender attitudes and ideologies. This investigation of 122 college women assessed multiple parameters of body image (i.e., evaluation, investment, and affect) and different facets of gender attitudes and feminist identity development. Results revealed minimal relationships between body-image attitudes and either feminist identity or adherence to traditional gender beliefs at individual/stereotypic or societal levels. On the other hand, traditional gender attitudes at the level of male-female social interactions were associated with stronger and more dysfunctional investments in cultural and personal appearance standards. The scientific, social, and clinical implications of these findings are discussed.     

(De)colonizing Culture in Community Psychology: Reflections from Critical Social Science

Since its inception, community psychology has been interested in cultural matters relating to issues of diversity and marginalization. However, the field has tended to understand culture as static social markers or as the background for understanding group differences. In this article the authors contend that culture is inseparable from who we are and what we do as social beings. Moreover, culture is continually shaped by socio-historical and political processes intertwined within the globalized history of power. The authors propose a decolonizing standpoint grounded in critical social science to disrupt understandings of cultural matters that marginalize others. This standpoint would move the field toward deeper critical thinking, reflexivity and emancipatory action. The authors present their work to illustrate how they integrate a decolonizing standpoint to community psychology research and teaching. They conclude that community psychology must aim towards intercultural work engaging its political nature from a place of ontological/epistemological/methodological parity.     

Toward the “overthrow of Platonism”: Processist critical social ontology and ameliorative discourse

In this article, I argue that, for the purpose of developing an effective critical social ontology about gender groups, it is not simply sufficient to carve gender groups at their joints: one must have in view whether the metaphysical categories we use to make sense of gender groups are prone to ideological distortion and vitiation. The norms underpinning a gender group's constitution as a type of social class and the norms involved in gender identity attributions, I propose, provide compelling reason to think critical social ontological discourse is more processist-orientated, rather than substantival-orientated. The advantages of a processist critical social ontology of gender groups are that, unlike substance-discourse, process-discourse recognizes how gender group talk and gender identity talk are often messy and therefore require a conceptual scheme that can transform vocabulary for the emancipatory purpose of ending oppression, domination, and marginalization.     

Generational Conversion? The Role of Religiosity in the Politics of Evangelicals

The political environment for evangelical Protestants has changed substantially since the Christian Right reached its apex, as a more issue and ideologically diffuse political environment has emerged. The present study tests two different theoretical perspectives on whether these contextual changes may have altered Millennial evangelicals’ political perspectives vis‐à‐vis those of previous generations of evangelicals. On the one hand, theoretical perspectives related to differential political socialization processes across generations would lead to expectations of generational change among evangelicals. On the other hand, theoretical perspectives related to social identity theory would suggest far less change across generations. Using Pew's 2007 U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, we test these expectations by comparing the relationships between religiosity and political attitudes across three generations of evangelicals. Ordered probit and logistic regression models estimate the impact of religiosity on various political attitudes. These models reveal that Millennial evangelical religiosity continues to be strongly related to Republican Party identification and opposition toward abortion, which is largely consistent with the social identity perspective. Generational change is most evident in a variety of nonsocial issues in which religiosity is associated with less conservatism among Millennials. Additional analysis using the 2012 Religion and Politics Survey with a smaller sample of Millennial evangelicals confirms these results.     

Culture masquerading,identity and organizational commitment

This mixed method study examines the impact of culture masquerading among 488 Filipino customer service representatives handling international accounts. Culture masquerading is practised via taking on foreign names, locations and nationalities. Applying social identity theory, it is hypothesized and supported that masquerading of nationality is negatively related to cultural identity. As predicted, there is a positive relationship between cultural identity and organization commitment. No support is found for the hypothesis that cultural identity mediates the relationship between culture masquerading. Situated identity theory and economic, social, and historical influences are used to explain these findings.     

拒富护穷：提议方贫富身份对公平关注的影响

通过2个系列实验探讨了提议方贫富身份对公平关注的影响以及社会实体公平感作为影响来源的可能作用。通过操纵提议方的贫富身份,实验1发现人们倾向于接受穷人提议方的非公平提议,进而证实贫富身份能够影响公平关注。实验2引入有利不公平转换和有利不公平转换任务,结果发现：在有利不公平条件下,人们更容易接受富人的提议,并且富人的有利不公平转换率显著低于穷人,从而确认了社会实体公平感的存在及其作用。这些结果初步证实提议方贫富身份会影响公平关注,社会实体公平感是这一影响的来源。     

Religion and Esotericism among Students: A Cross-Cultural Comparative Study

Analysing the results of a study on religious and esoteric beliefs and practice among university students from five European and five American countries, we found that the level of religiousness of students depends very much on their cultural environment: the level of religiosity and esoteric beliefs is significantly higher among North- and South-American students than among European students. On the other hand, Asian spiritual techniques and esoteric methods of healing are practised more frequently by students in North-Western European countries. In the second part of the paper, we examine the relationship between academic discipline and religious worldviews. According to our data, students in the social sciences and the arts are more distanced from religion than students of other areas of science, but they, like students of medicine and languages, are closer to esotericism than students of the 'exact sciences'. Several hypotheses are proposed to explain these results.     

The secular model of the multi‐cultural state

On what model should a modern multi‐cultural democracy work? Spinosa et al. have argued that the political order should be sustained by a set of common values instilled in the citizens, without, however, any common rank order among these values. I argue that the multi‐cultural state should rather conform to what I call the Secular Model, according to which the citizens need not share any basic values at all. On the Secular Model, people individually stick to the existing constitution (only) as long as they each feel that they have good reasons to do so. To be sure, each citizen of a multi‐cultural state does need a feeling of community identity, a ‘we’ ideology, but it is desirable that each individual can have more than one such identity. It is also important that each individual can shift as he or she pleases, from one such identity to another. So this kind of identity should not be moulded by the state, but by various different free associations, independent of the state.     

Psychology and Culture: Back to the Future?

Psychology has a poor record in addressing cultural phenomena. One response is to turn to ancient concepts from local traditions and to use these as alternative analytic categories to explain behavior. However, there are problems with such an approach. These concepts will be read from the vantage point of the present and interpreted differently so as to propose different diagnoses (and solutions) for contemporary social problems. As an alternative, rather than using ancient resources as analytic categories in the explanation of behavior, we could instead examine how they are used as categories of practice as people actively make sense of their social context and themselves. Attending to such contemporary ‘lay’ usage (and the contestation it entails) allows for a more dynamic conception of cultural processes than is typical in psychology. More generally, I believe that it is possible to use our psychological constructs so that we can see the distinctive particularities of the phenomena before us in new and interesting ways, and in ways that respect their cultural specificity. This claim is illustrated through reference to recent work using the concept of social identity to illuminate aspects of Hindu pilgrimage.     

Rollenübernahme und unbewusste Konflikte

The discussion about identity in the process of social change in Western nations seems to be the domain of sociologists and philosophists. In the last years, however, there has been an increasing interest among psychoanalysts concerning the question what the psychoanalytic contribution to this interdisciplinary discourse could be. In this article, first Erikson’s considerations to the concept of identity are presented, delivering important entries and the context to the topic. Then, further psychoanalytic authors and their thoughts on identity are presented. Their common ground is the theory of inner conflicts, but they vary in their comprehension of these conflicts. From the psychoanalytic point of view it could be said that the identity of an individual is formed in the moment when the inner conflicts are balanced in an appropriate way. For sociologists and social behaviourists, however, identity is formed automatically in the daily role-taking process in different social fields. By taking the role of another and balancing it with our own role definition our sense of selfhood can arise. Mead has created the concept of “Me” and “I” to describe the conflicts of this process. Brede pointed out the different areas of validity both of sociology and psychoanalysis. Her work has been helpful to outline the possible interdisciplinary intermediation of both sciences. Finally, as a conclusion, the potential contribution of psychoanalysis is described as a concept that could enrich the identity discussion. The individual has to balance intrinsic desires against the needs of social interaction, thus emphasising the discontinuity of nature and culture.     

“Danger,Will Robinson!” The challenges of social robots for intergroup relations

Society's increasing reliance on robots in everyday life provides exciting opportunities for social psychologists to work with engineers in the nascent field of social robotics. In contrast to industrial robots that, for example, may be used on an assembly line, social robots are designed specifically to interact with humans and/or other robots. People tend to perceive social robots as autonomous and capable of having a mind. As such, they are also more likely to be subject to social categorization by humans. As social robots become more human like, people may also feel greater empathy for them and treat robots more like (human) ingroup members. On the other hand, as they become more human like, robots also challenge our human distinctiveness, threaten our identity, and elicit suspicion about their ability to deceive us with their human‐like qualities. We review relevant research to explore this apparent paradox, particularly from an intergroup relations perspective. We discuss these findings and propose three research questions that we believe social psychologists are ideally suited to address.     

Psychoanalytische Aspekte des Umzugs von West nach Ost im vereinten Deutschland

After the reunion of East and West Germany many people of the former GDR had to deal with cultural shocks and adjustment difficulties of different types in the new cultural environment, which could be characterized as becoming intimate with post-modern western culture in a process of identity development. On the other hand people who move from West Germany to East Germany still are confronted with the heritage of harassment in public and private life over more than two generations. Some of these persons, especially those who were victims of early traumata in their childhood during the rigid and authoritarian social world after World War II in West Germany, are subject to re-traumatization under these circumstances. Two case vignettes illustrate these phenomena. The childhood traumata of these patients, their coping in West Germany, and the process of pathological regression after the removal to East Germany are described and analyzed.     

民族接触减弱民族本质论：文化认同与文化相似性的中介作用

采用问卷法,以911名少数民族和汉族大学生为被试,探讨了民族接触减弱民族本质论及其机制问题。研究1检验了民族接触与民族本质论、民族交往态度的关系,结果表明,少数民族被试的民族接触与民族本质论存在显著负相关,汉族被试存在负相关但不显著;研究2检验了少数民族被试的本民族文化认同和与汉族文化的相似性感知在民族接触和民族本质论之间的中介作用。结果表明,文化认同和文化相似性完全中介了民族接触和民族本质论之间的负相关。文章认为民族接触可以通过增加民族之间文化相似性感知、降低内群体的文化认同而减弱民族本质论信念。最后讨论了本研究在理论和实践方面的贡献,以及存在的局限性。