Fractured Stories: Self-Experiences of Third Culture Kids

ABSTRACT

The term Third Culture Kid (TCK) was first coined by researchers John and Ruth Useem in the 1950s. These children spend a substantial part of their childhood in countries that differ from their passport country, often for their parent’s work. Because TCKs move from culture to culture prior to having the opportunity to fully develop their personal and cultural identity, they may have additional problems relating to peers within their own ethnic groups. For children who return to the United States after living abroad, they may need to ‘catch up’ as they are at a loss around certain culture references. While they speak the same language as their peers, they had such varied childhoods that there is often a lack of shared memories and reference points that they can use to relate. This paper will explore the additional stress that can occur for TCKs throughout their childhood and adolescence, and how expressive arts therapy can assist them in creating a more cohesive self–narrative. Using play, art and imagination, three case studies of TCK’s will be examined, understanding that children who maintain a capacity for play and creativity can often “play through” life challenges.     

Forgiveness or breakup: Sex differences in responses to a partner's infidelity

Infidelities--sexual, emotional, or both--afflict many long-term romantic relationships. When a person discovers a partner's betrayal, a major decision faced is to forgive the partner and remain together or to terminate the relationship. Because men and women have confronted different adaptive problems over evolutionary history associated with different forms of infidelity, we hypothesised the existence of sex differences in which aspects of infidelity would affect the likelihood of forgiveness or breakup. We tested this hypothesis using forced-choice dilemmas in which participants (N = 256) indicated how difficult it would be to forgive the partner and how likely they would be to break up with the partner, depending on the nature of the infidelity. Results support the hypothesis that men, relative to women: (a) find it more difficult to forgive a sexual infidelity than an emotional infidelity; and (b) are more likely to terminate a current relationship following a partner's sexual infidelity than an emotional infidelity. The Discussion provides directions for future work on the determinants of breakup and the psychology of forgiveness.     

Accent trumps race in guiding children's social preferences

A series of experiments investigated the effect of speakers' language, accent, and race on children's social preferences. When presented with photographs and voice recordings of novel children, 5-year-old children chose to be friends with native speakers of their native language rather than foreign-language or foreign-accented speakers. These preferences were not exclusively due to the intelligibility of the speech, as children found the accented speech to be comprehensible, and did not make social distinctions between foreign-accented and foreign-language speakers. Finally, children chose same-race children as friends when the target children were silent, but they chose other-race children with a native accent when accent was pitted against race. A control experiment provided evidence that children's privileging of accent over race was not due to the relative familiarity of each dimension. The results, discussed in an evolutionary framework, suggest that children preferentially evaluate others along dimensions that distinguished social groups in prehistoric human societies.