Rehabilitation of the Culturally Different: A Model of the Individual in Cultural Change

Services of rehabilitation agencies and facilities tend to be structured to the needs of the larger American culture. It is important, however, to reconsider our social service programs in view of the needs of different cultural groups when providing services that will aid these individuals to move across cultural boundaries. An attempt is made in this paper to develop a model of the individual who undergoes such cultural transition. Such a model should help define problems in service programs, assess the value of current service activities, and identify areas for developing new services that will aid the overall process of cultural transition. A model of behavior development is outlined, followed by a formulation of a model of the individual in cultural change.     

文化神经科学：一个新兴的跨学科领域

文化神经科学是一个将文化,心理和大脑整合起来的新兴的跨学科领域。本文简要地介绍了从2000年到2010年在文化神经科学领域内的各种观点,同时回顾了该领域里一些典型的功能性磁共振（fMRI）的研究成果。文章认为,文化神经科学可为人类心理的研究提供一个全新的,整合性的理论框架,而且,它还为中国心理学家提供了机遇：使用中国被试开展文化神经科学研究去取得世界一流的成果。     

试析现代西方心理学的文化转向

西方心理学正在展现出对文化影响日渐增加的关注。这种文化转向既有科学哲学和历史的原因,也受到世界范围内心理学本土化运动的影响。文化转向的主要表现是：(1)对心理学自然科学模式的反思与诘难;(2)多元文化心理学的兴起;(3)跨文化心理学面临的批评及其转变;(4)认知心理学、发展心理学和健康心理学等分支领域对文化影响的关注。作者认为,文化的转向对于西方心理学的发展具有积极的意义。     

Migrant Knowledge Workers’ Perceptions of Housing Conditions in Gulf Cities

The various efforts in diversifying local economies in most Gulf States led to the emergence of new medium to high-income groups of migrant knowledge workers whose efforts are required to develop various new economic sectors. This paper aims to investigate the current housing conditions and perceptions of these migrant communities to identify key similarities and differences with respect to housing made available to them and depending on their cultural background. To this end, the methodology involves field surveys to explore the three main housing typologies for higher-income groups and a questionnaire with a total of 258 knowledge workers in the city of Doha as a representative case to investigate the associated perceptions of four dominant groups from different cultural backgrounds. The findings reveal that there is a distinct social segregation between cultural groups, which is mainly rooted in varying income levels. Furthermore, the supply-driven market has hardly integrated cultural needs of migrants and thus diversified and inclusive housing has been identified as major planning and design challenge.     

Religion and Science in America: Populism versus Elitism

Historian James Gilbert argues that the dialogue between science and religion is an important dynamic in the creation of contemporary American culture. He traces the dialogue not only in the confines of the academic world but also in popular culture. The science-religion dialogue reveals a basic tension between the material and the spiritual that helps define the core of the American psyche: fascination with material progress yet commitment to traditional religious beliefs. Gilbert's cultural narrative traces the dialogue in a unique way because of the attention given to popular renditions of science and religion in evangelical films used by the military, in televised science programs, in science-fiction literature, and at the Seattle World's Fair in 1962. Gilbert suggests that the discussion between science and religion is significant because it is part of the process of creating new cultural structures necessitated by social, scientific, and technological developments. The tensions between religiously informed commonsense science and professional science work to create new cultural forms in a democratic society. Religion and science in dialogue are part of the process of cultural creation. Dogmatism on the part of either scientists or religionists is countered by the democratic process itself.     

Population Thinking in Epistemic Evolution: Bridging Cultural Evolution and the Philosophy of Science

Researchers in cultural evolutionary theory (CET) have recently proposed the foundation of a new field of research in cultural evolution named ‘epistemic evolution’. Drawing on evolutionary epistemology’s early studies, this programme aims to study science as an evolutionary cultural process. The paper discusses the way CET’s study of science can contribute to the philosophical debate and, vice versa, how the philosophy of science can benefit from the adoption of a cultural evolutionary perspective. Here, I argue that CET’s main contribution to an evolutionary model of scientific growth comes from the application of ‘population thinking’ to science. Populationism offers a ‘variation based’ understanding of scientists’ epistemic and socio-epistemic criteria that is able to better accommodate the variegated preferences that intervene in scientific epistemic decisions. A discussion of the so called theory choice context is offered as an example of the way a populationist approach can shed new light on the operation of scientists’ epistemic choices.

     

Enhancing CBT Consultation With Multicultural Counseling Principles

The use of multicultural principles to enhance cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) for individuals of marginalized backgrounds has received increased attention in light of the heightened national awareness of systemic oppression and racialized violence directed towards Black, Indigenous, and People of Color. However, there has been less of a focus on applying such principles to consultation for skill development. If ethical guidelines are expected to influence the behavior of clinicians in session, guidance is needed to indicate how and where and when clinicians should receive training in implementing culturally responsive CBT. Individual reading and reflection are necessary but are not sufficient in acquiring new clinical skills. Consultation is recommended and strongly suggested when clinicians are working with new populations or delivering a new treatment, or even using a new modality. Consultation can also be useful when adopting a new approach or stance to therapy. For practicing clinicians who have not developed these skills, additional consultation can and should be used to address this gap. Moving forward, integration of cultural responsiveness into standard consultation will ensure that these skills are seen as a core competency, rather than an optional additional skill that may be (or not be) elected. This paper presents core experiences that may be integral to a CBT consultation model that aims to enhance providers’ ability to provide CBT in a way that is culturally responsive to their clients. These recommendations attend to both content and process within CBT consultation and reflect guiding assumptions for helping clinicians to develop the ability to practice CBT in a culturally responsive manner, including (a) normalizing discussions of cultural identity and oppression, (b) an emphasis on cultural self-awareness, (c) emphasizing culturally informed CBT case conceptualization, and (d) skill development in applying cultural elements to CBT interventions.     

Examining the link between institutional and community violence: Toward a new cultural paradigm

New explanations of cultural processes are sought, in part, because existing hypotheses are at odds with new wave contemporary empirical findings. Namely, a growing body of scholarship calls into question the “racial invariance” hypothesis proposed by Sampson and Wilson (1995), particularly as it applies to Latinos. Based on these findings, it stands to reason that culture, in addition to structure, may be a property of communities that helps to explain racial/ethnic involvement in crime. This article explores the link between institutional and community violence, and then compares traditional perspectives on the influence of culture on violence (e.g. Wolfgang and Ferracuti’s subculture of violence) with newer, more dynamic conceptualizations of the cultural influence of violence in both institutional and community settings (e.g. Sampson and Bean’s relational theory of culture). The authors consider how both institutional and community violence may be explained using a new cultural paradigm, which moves beyond traditional views of “culture as values” to a new relational theory of “culture in action”. They present a model for understanding, and researching, culture that is based on the notion that value systems in institutions and neighborhoods influence one another. Offering examples from recent research on prison culture, they examine the key dimensions of this new cultural paradigm, which describes culture as “intersubjective, performative, cognitive, relational, and world-making”. The authors conclude that further examination of the reciprocal relationship between institutional and community culture is needed before we can begin to consider the policy implications of the “culture in action” paradigm.     

The Arts and the Future City

The framework in which, better than in any other, cultural complexity becomes clear as a network of perspectives is the city: it is here that the greatest variety of subcultures, together with the widest range of contrasting modalities, seems able to handle its meaning. The city is at the same time an active place of cultural production and a passive and active place of memory keeping. It fuels styles and models of sensitivity also, and especially, through art and architecture. Therefore, it becomes itself a cultural model able to orient taste, but also to continually disorient it through agency. Starting from the revitalization of the cultural capital of the cities, art can play the important role of cultural magnet by catalyzing moods and emotions, conveying otherwise chaotic needs and languages, promoting new tolerance and social and cultural integration. However, in the meantime, from a secluded and distinct place that organizes the use of cultural and artistic products within recognizable boundaries, the city is becoming an undifferentiated place, a city-beyond, scattered and/or boundless. Characterized by the undifferentiated and the mutant, the uncertain and the liquid, the deformable and the relative, the space of art perception will be rethought within and without the city.     

Is the attribution of cultural differences to minorities an expression of racial prejudice?

The social psychological literature considers two main perspectives on the study of perceived cultural differences between majorities and minorities: one proposes that perception of cultural differences is an antecedent of prejudice and another states that the attribution of cultural differences to minorities is already a hidden expression of racial prejudice. This paper offers further support to this latter perspective. One hundred and ninety-four participants answered a questionnaire measuring (1) general racist belief; (2) cultural differences attributed to Black people (hetero-ethnicization); (3) the asymmetric attribution of secondary and primary emotions to the in-group and to Black people (infra-humanization); (4) the asymmetric attribution of natural and cultural traits to in-group members and to Black people (ontologization); and (5) negative evaluation of this social category. The general racist belief scale was not anchored in a specific group and measured the belief in the inferiority of certain social groups or peoples based on biological or cultural factors. Relationships between the scales were analysed through a set of Structural Equation Models. According to the predictions, results showed that the attribution of cultural differences is a dimension of prejudice. Results also showed that attribution of cultural differences, negative evaluation of Black people, ontologization, and infra-humanization were different dimensions of a common latent factor that can be identified as racial prejudice; and that prejudice was predicted by general racist belief. Results are discussed in the light of the study of the impact of perceived cultural differences on intergroup relations and in the light of the "new racism" approaches.     

Disturbing Politics: Neo‐Paulinism and the Scrambling of Religious and Secular Identities

Abstract : One of the most remarkable characteristics of recent cultural theory is its obsession with the early Christian apostle Paul. With this interest in Paul as contemporary cultural theory, a panoply of modern identities find themselves obsolesced, scrambled, or otherwise useless. This essay attempts to find new points of orientation within those scrambled identities that have appeared with this new Paul, and the essay does so by exploring the idea that we are now repeating a Pauline moment of kairos, that apocalyptic moment in which meaningful transformation of the world may occur.     

Language acquisition meets language evolution

Recent research suggests that language evolution is a process of cultural change, in which linguistic structures are shaped through repeated cycles of learning and use by domain-general mechanisms. This paper draws out the implications of this viewpoint for understanding the problem of language acquisition, which is cast in a new, and much more tractable, form. In essence, the child faces a problem of induction, where the objective is to coordinate with others (C-induction), rather than to model the structure of the natural world (N-induction). We argue that, of the two, C-induction is dramatically easier. More broadly, we argue that understanding the acquisition of any cultural form, whether linguistic or otherwise, during development, requires considering the corresponding question of how that cultural form arose through processes of cultural evolution. This perspective helps resolve the "logical" problem of language acquisition and has far-reaching implications for evolutionary psychology.     

Minority elite formation in transnational perspective: A plea for a research program, illustrated by two Dutch cases

Since the 1950s nation-state building theories have dominated the debate on immigration in Europe and in the United States. The incorporation processes of “uprooted” immigrants into a new society are traditionally explained in terms of assimilaton or (ethnic) pluralization. Only recently has a new concept of transational migration been emerging. Following work done previously by Basch and Faist, in this article it is tentatively argued: (a) that cultural transnationalization among immigrants is as important as political and economic transnationalization; and (b) that political opportunity structures in the nation of residence facilitate not only cultural transnationalization, but also the formation of transnational cultural elites. These propositions are illustrated by the rise and expansion of Surinam Dutch soccer stardom and by the rise of a transnational Turkish/Moroccan Dutch Islam and of Turkish/Moroccan Dutch religious (Islamic) leadership.     

Gender,Physical Attractiveness,and Assertiveness

Abstract

This study was an examination of comfortable proxemic distances assumed by the interactants, female Canadian students. Previous studies were consistent with Hall'S (1959, 1966) cultural model only when the interactants were from the same cultural group. When they were from different cultural groups, however, the cultural model was not adequate: The findings were more consistent with a symbolic interactionist interpretation, namely, that a negotiation takes place and the comfortable distance is adjusted to that of both groups. In this study, we held cultural group and sex constant and introduced the problem of the interviewer'S retreat from the original comfortable distance established by the subject. In all cases, the subject re-established a new comfortable distance that was a compromise between the one originally chosen and the distance assumed by the interviewer.     

文化演化的认知视角——从个体社会学习出发探究文化动态性

文化演化是多学科共同关心的文化研究主题。文化演化的认知视角是心理学家切入该研究主题的一种方式, 它着眼于社会文化环境中的个体认知, 研究个体在社会学习过程中对文化信息的加工、改变、记忆与提取。文化演化的认知视角借用达尔文生物演化理论, 涉及文化传承、创新、选择三个子领域, 提出了文化演化的三原则: 遗传、变异、选择。文化传承的路径包括模仿和教导, 类型分为工具性与习俗性文化传承; 文化创新具有层次性, 人类特有的累积性文化演化建立在文化创新的基础之上, 体现了文化创新的代际传递; 基于行为生态学和人类认知机制的文化选择造成了文化信息的差异化适应。未来研究可以从研究概念、研究思路、研究方法三方面推进认知视角下的文化演化研究, 探索更高层次的文化创新, 扩展文化演化的前因变量, 结合新技术加深对文化演化的理解; 发挥文化演化对文化心理学研究的助推作用, 研究文化混搭、个性心理特征对文化演化的影响。     

Cultural Psychology of Differences and EMS; a New Theoretical Framework for Understanding and Reconstructing Culture

In this paper I introduce the outlines of our new type of theoretical framework named ‘Cultural psychology of Differences’ for understanding cultural others and dialogically reconstructing interactions among cultural others. In order to understand cultural others, it is necessary for us to reconstruct a new concept which enables us to analyze dynamic generation processes of culture. We propose the concept of Expanded Mediational Structure, EMS, as an elementary unit for understanding human social interactions. EMS is composed of subjects who interacts each other using objects of some kind as mediators, and a normative mediator, NM, which mediates their interactions. It is necessary to generate, share and adjust a NM to keep social interactions stable, and culture will appear when interaction malfunction is attributed to a gaps of NMs. The concept of EMS helps us to understand how culture is functionally substantialized in the plane of collective (or communal) intersubjectivity and how cultural conflicts develop and intensify. Focusing on the generation process of culture through interactions provides us with another option to understand cultural others through dialogical interactions with them.     

The Horizontal/Vertical Distinction in Cross‐Cultural Consumer Research

We argue for the importance of a relatively new cultural distinction in the horizontal (valuing equality) or vertical (emphasizing hierarchy) nature of cultures and cultural orientations. A review of the existing cross‐cultural literature is presented suggesting that, although the contribution of the horizontal/vertical distinction is sometimes obscured by methods that conflate it with other dimensions, its impact is distinct from that associated with individualism–collectivism. We present studies that highlight several sources of value for the horizontal/vertical distinction—as a predictor of new consumer psychology phenomena and as a basis for refining the understanding of known phenomena. Results support the utility of examining this distinction for the understanding of personal values, advertising and consumer persuasion, self‐presentational patterns, and gender differences. Methodological issues in studying the horizontal/vertical distinction are also discussed.     

Premodern, modern, and postmodern perspectives on sex and gender mixes

Postmodern sensibilities, generally associated with relational psychoanalysis, are applicable also in traditional and contemporary Freudian psychoanalytic contexts. Historically speaking, views of femininity and female sexuality may be ordered according to positions designated as premodern, modern, and postmodern. This temporal continuum provides a basis for incorporating aspects of postmodern feminist approaches to deconstructing gender into a more traditional yet contemporary psychoanalytic framework. The postmodern "crisis of category" is addressed through a critique from a modern psychoanalytic point of view of the gender stereotyping inherent in certain false binaries and either/or thinking of premodern psychoanalytic thinking regarding female (as well as male) sex and gender. The cultural changes brought about by the consciousness-raising of postmodern feminist and contemporary psychoanalytic thinking contribute significantly to evolutionary changes in the understanding of gender that are further internalized and represented intrapsychically. That is, sequential transformations in the internalization of new cultural norms influence the development of still more new cultural norms, so that progression in these identificatory markers of gender can be observed over successive generations.     

Navigating Local and Global Worlds: Opportunities and Risks for Adolescent Cultural Identity Development

This essay focuses on the opportunities and risks that adolescents face when developing cultural identities in the context of globalization. It starts by illustrating how globalization entails that adolescents increasingly have interactions with people from diverse cultures in myriad domains. Adolescents navigate local and global worlds, for example, with regard to language, diet, dating, and work. With the exposure to diverse cultures, new opportunities and risks arise. The nature of and evidence for three of these are highlighted. One is the risk of adolescent cultural identity confusion, with attendant internalizing and externalizing pathological behaviors. A second is the emergence of cultural gaps between adolescents and parents, a phenomenon that may constitute both a risk and a necessity. The third issue discussed is the way that globalization may open up more opportunities for youth civic involvement, even if such involvement sometimes aims to resist globalization.     

The Great Sustainability Challenge: How Visitor Studies Can Save Cultural Institutions in the 21st Century

ABSTRACT

Sustainability will be the great challenge for many cultural institutions in the first quarter of the 21st Century. Changing patterns of government, corporate, and individual support, new demographics, and new ways of creating, preserving, and sharing information are all challenging the sustainability of museums and other cultural institutions. In 2001 a meeting of science museum leaders in Bristol identified 3 distinct but interacting dimensions to sustainability: financial, intellectual, and social. Financial crises are the most obvious threats to the survival of institutions, but intellectual and social weaknesses can be equally dangerous and can make a temporary financial problem fatal. Visitor studies have the potential to provide crucial understandings that cultural institutions will need to build new, more sustainable models than the ones which served the previous century.