In search of cultural diversity: recent literature in cross-cultural and ethnic minority psychology

The purpose of this study was to identify where the most work on cross-cultural and ethnic minority psychology is being published and who the most productive authors are. The journals that published the most articles on cross-cultural and ethnic minority issues from 1993 to 1999 and the most prolific authors on these issues were identified by PsycINFO. Cross-cultural research is cross-national, whereas ethnic minority research involves groups of color within the United States. The citation impact of these journals and authors was determined from the 1997 Social Sciences Citation Index. The results suggest that there is very limited overlap between the literatures in cross-cultural and ethnic minority psychology. Most of the research in these areas is published in specialty journals, and there is a paucity of this research in prestigious journals. Perceived or actual barriers to publication in prestigious journals may cause some to seek specialty journals as outlets for research on cultural diversity. The top scholars in cross-cultural psychology are primarily men of European ancestry, whereas most of the top scholars in ethnic minority psychology are ethnic minority men and women. Strategies to increase the prominence of cultural diversity in the psychology literature include combining cross-cultural and ethnic minority psychology, increasing the number of editorial board members of prestigious journals having expertise in cultural diversity, and increasing the quality of specialty journals. Psychology will remain ill-equipped to face the challenges of the new millennium without increased attention to cultural diversity.     

Indigenous, cultural, and cross-cultural psychology: A theoretical, conceptual, and epistemological analysis

This paper compares indigenous, cultural, and cross-cultural psychology by examining their theoretical, conceptual, and epistemological foundations. They have been influenced by the three research traditions in psychology: (1) universalist, (2) contextualist, and (3) integrationist approaches. The goal of the universalist approach is to test and verify universality of existing psychological theories. Cultural psychologists, in contrast, point out that presumed universals are actually Western impositions and not universals. They affirm the contextualist approach and argue that every culture possesses its own unique characteristics, and they should be understood from within the culture. Integrationists argue that search for universals should include the content and context of culture, and they reject absolute universalism and relativism. In cross-cultural psychology, two integrationist approaches can be identified: the derived etic approach (Berry, 1980) and the indigenous psychologies approach (Kim, Park, & Park, 1999). In the derived etic approach, researchers adapt and integrate existing theories to fit local knowledge. Indigenization as articulated by Sinha (1997) represents this approach. In the indigenous psychologies approach, the primary goal is to understand how people think, feel, and behave in a particular context. It advocates a bottom-up model-building paradigm that examines the generative capabilities of human beings. Detailed analysis of the indigenous psychologies approach is provided.     

Integrating cross-cultural psychology research methods into ethnic minority psychology

Multicultural psychology has 2 related but often disconnected streams, namely cross-cultural psychology and racial and ethnic minority psychology (Hall & Maramba, 2001). We propose that advances in both fields will be facilitated if there is greater cross-fertilization, especially in methodological approaches given that proponents in both fields are interested in studying and understanding the role and impact of culture on human behavior. To facilitate this cross-fertilization, we present 3 methodological approaches that would be of value in racial and ethnic minority psychology. First, we present an overview of the importance of and the approaches to evaluating and establishing measurement equivalence. Second, we discuss recent advances in the understanding of conceptual equivalence in light of indigenous approaches, cultural manipulation, and multilevel analysis. Third, we present a combined etic-emic approach to cross-cultural personality research as illustrated by the Cross-Cultural Personality Assessment Inventory developed by Fanny Cheung and her colleagues.     

The cultural psychology of Kohut's self psychology

Contrary to criticism, Heinz Kohut's self psychology does not support an absorption into self nor a morally neutral response to society. Kohut's psychology of the self and narcissism aims toward an analysis of contemporary Western culture that will restore it. In the process of assisting individuals and culture to recover from the vicissitudes of narcissism, Kohut has introduced a new type of cultural psychology, a culture of empathy.     

松-紧文化:跨文化心理学研究的新维度

松-紧文化是跨文化心理学研究的新维度,它发轫于人类学的文化田野考察,致力于刻画不同文化间社会规范强度和对偏差行为宽容程度的结构性特征.松-紧文化有其较为明确的概念定义和成因,以及在国家、区域和个体层次上的测量方法.松-紧文化已广泛运用于自我、人格、心理健康与幸福感、判断与决策、创新、脑认知神经和基因、恐怖主义与社会和谐等心理学基础和应用研究主题之中.未来研究可进一步甄别细分社会规范中的描述性规范和命令性规范,并综合吸收其它研究视角的长处.     

Evolutionary psychology,biology, and cultural evolution

Evolutionary approaches to behavior, so far from indicating that human behavioral patterns must be universal and wired, actually provide us with good reasons for expecting cultural diversity and good tools for showing how it might develop. Even gender-role related behavior may be very plastic. Highly macho male behavior may be an adaptation to dangerous ecological and economic constraints. Similarly, homicide rates differ massively from culture to culture and may be under the control of specificable ecological and economic constraints.Adapted from a symposium talk given at the annual meeting of the Society for Experimental Social Psychology, October 13, 1990, Buffalo, New York. David Buss, Nancy Cantor, and Claude Steele made helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.     

Recovering Bartlett's social psychology of cultural dynamics

Despite the current treatment of Frederic C. Bartlett as a cognitive psychologist, his psychology was fundamentally socio‐cultural. More than half a century after the publication of Psychology and Primitive Culture (1923) and Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology (1932), his theoretical contribution has contemporary implications for a social psychology that takes culture seriously. This paper seeks to recover and appraise Bartlett's social psychology in light of the recent literature on culture and psychology, and discusses his relevance for a social psychology of cultural dynamics. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Attachment avoidance and the cultural fit hypothesis: A cross-cultural investigation

This study examined the impact of attachment avoidance on relationship outcomes. A "cultural fit" hypothesis, which states that individual differences in personality should be associated with relationship problems if they encourage patterns of behavior that are incongruent with cultural norms, was investigated. It was hypothesized that attachment avoidance, a style of relationship in which emotional distance and independence are emphasized, would be more strongly associated with relationship problems in more collectivist societies (Hong Kong and Mexico) than in a more individualist one (the United States), given the greater emphasis placed on closeness and harmony in relationships in collectivist cultures. As predicted, associations between avoidant attachment and relationship problems were stronger in Hong Kong and Mexico than in the United States.     

基于大数据的文化心理分析

随着大数据技术与文化心理学的融合发展, 计算文化心理学作为一门新兴交叉学科逐渐兴起, 大尺度、近乎全样本的文化心理分析真正得以实现。计算文化心理学关注的文化变量主要围绕个人主义/集体主义这一文化心理学使用最为广泛的维度展开, 分析方法包括特征词典、机器学习、社会网络分析、仿真模拟等, 分析思路包括时间维度上的文化变迁效应以及空间维度上的文化地理效应。当然, 计算文化心理学在为传统文化心理研究提供新方法、新范式的同时, 也存在解码失真、样本偏差、词语多义性、隐私风险等局限, 未来研究应重视变量理论解释、文化动态演化分析、学科深度整合、生态效度等问题。     

Residential mobility and consumer psychology through a cultural lens

This study provides an extensive review of research on residential and relational mobility and discusses antecedents and consequences that implicate a wide range of psychological processes and behaviors. This commentary highlights their theoretical and practical significance in consumer research and discusses through a cultural lens the implications for specific consumer psychology domains. It also highlights the intricacy of mobility constructs, distinguishes them from the individualism–collectivism construct, and identifies consumer outcomes that warrant nuanced predictions based on residential and relational mobility and other cultural frameworks. The commentary concludes with ideas for future research.     

Epistemic cultural constraints on the uses of psychology

This paper describes some epistemic cultural considerations which shape the uses of psychology. I argue the study of mind is bound by the metaphysical background of the given locale and era in which it is practiced. The epistemic setting in which psychology takes place will shape what is worth observing, how it is to be studied, how the data is to be interpreted, and the nature of the ultimate explanatory units. To demonstrate conceptual epistemic constraints, I discuss metaphor use in psychology. In addition, epistemic constraints shape the praxes that arise from structural study of the mind. In order to illustrate this cultural constraint, I discuss Soviet Psychology and provide a contrast between practical uses of psychoanalysis in India, Egypt, and rural Ghana. In response to these conceptual and practical epistemic limitations, psychology could adapt methods drawn from history and anthropology.     

The relationship between scientific psychology and common-sense psychology

This paper explores the relationship between common-sense psychology (CSP) and scientific psychology (SP) — which we could call the mind-mind problem. CSP has come under much attack recently, most of which is thought to be unjust or misguided. This paper's first section examines the many differences between the aims, interests, explananda, explanantia, methodology, conceptual frameworks, and relationships to the neurosciences, that divide CSP and SP. Each of the two is valid within its own territory, and there is no competition between them — primarily because CSP is not, and has no interest in being, a scientific theory. In the second section some implications are drawn. First, neither CSP nor SP has the mind-body problem in its familiar form. Second, CSP, for excellent reasons, is not equipped to handle irrational or non-rational behaviour; there are some grounds for believing that this can and should be the task of SP. Third, philosophical psychology, or armchair theories of action, perception, etc., are doomed to failure. And, fourth, the realm of the psychological is so heterogeneous that no single model for either CSP or SP is likely to succeed.     

Cognitive contours: recent work on cross-cultural psychology and its relevance for education

This paper outlines new work in cross-cultural psychology largely drawn from Nisbett, Choi, and Smith (Cognition, 65, 15–32, 1997); Nisbett, Peng, Choi, & Norenzayan, Psychological Review, 108(2), 291–310, 2001; Nisbett, The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently...and Why. New York: Free Press 2003), Ji, Zhang and Nisbett (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 87(1), 57–65, 2004), Norenzayan (2000) and Peng (Naive Dialecticism and its Effects on Reasoning and Judgement about Contradiction. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan 1997) Peng and Nisbett (Cross-Cultural Similarities and Differences in the Understanding of Physical Causality. Paper presented at the Science and Culture: Proceedings of the Seventh Interdisciplinary Conference on Science and Culture, Frankfort, K. Y. 1996), and Peng, Ames, & Knowles (Culture and Human Inference: Perspectives from three traditions. In: D. Matsumoto (Ed.), Handbook of Cross-Cultural Psychology (pp. 1–2). Oxford: Oxford University Press 2000). The paper argues that the findings on cultural influences on inference-making have implications for teaching and education generally, and specifically for the debate on conceptions and misconceptions of Asian students studying in western tertiary institutions around the world. The position defended is that, while there seems to be compelling empirical evidence for intercultural differences in thought patterns, these patterns are, for the most part, insignificant in everyday exchanges, though language and culture might subtlety modulate our inference-making at the margins. Linguistic determinism however is not defended. Nonetheless, the evidence provides food for thought, and it needs to inform the recent debates about international students studying overseas.

Cross-cultural psychology: A symbiosis of cultural and comparative approaches

Culture–behaviour relationships can be understood in relation to many dimensions. It is argued that the cultural, indigenous and comparative traditions of research are mutually compatible, and indeed permit a symbiotic approach. This symbiosis produces a generic field, that of cross-cultural psychology, into which the three traditions can be incorporated, and permits the pursuit of a universal psychology.     

Culture and personality: toward an integrated cultural trait psychology

Two theoretical perspectives currently dominate research on culture and personality, the cross-cultural trait psychology approach, in which the trait concept is central, and the cultural psychology approach, in which the trait concept is questioned. Here I review theory and research from both perspectives and propose that the tenets of cultural psychology, at least in their more moderate forms, can be synthesized with the trait psychology approach, resulting in an integrated cultural trait psychology perspective.     

Social identity and the recoding of reality : its relevance for cross-cultural psychology1

A methodological development in a current research program for the cross-cultural study of subjective identity is presented. The Associative Network Analysis (ANA) permits an idiographic exploration of cognitive mapping; it consists in generating the associative structure linked to various aspects of the individual's phenomenal world including the Self. Categorisation of social identity elements are seen as the result of recoding processes through which experience is transformed into images and thoughts and selectively stored in long term memory. Recoding rules expressing a link between individual values, strivings and perception of the external world can be determined.