Sociocultural factors, resilience, and coping: Support for a culturally sensitive measure of resilience

This investigation presents 1) a literature review concerning how adversity and resilience influence the development of youth from diverse cultural backgrounds; 2) an examination of measures of resilience with regard to cultural factors that relate to the nature of coping and resilience among young adults from diverse racial/ethnic backgrounds; and 3) the exploration of aspects of cultural resilience: childhood stressors, global coping, adaptive coping, maladaptive coping, and sociocultural support. Results for 305 college age women indicated that cultural factors were related to measures of these five aspects of resilience. Childhood stressors were experienced differentially by individuals from different racial/ethnic and social class status backgrounds, supporting proposals that ecological aspects, notably cultural background and experiences, influence the development of resilience. A conceptual framework illustrating how culture contributes to resilience and coping is presented. Implications for the development of a measure of cultural resilience and its usefulness for developmental community interventions are discussed.     

Demarcating Role Transitions as Indicators of Adulthood in the 21st Century: Who Are They?

The present study examines the transition into adulthood from a Symbolic Interactionism perspective, where people come to define themselves based on cultural influences and established cultural norms. College students (N = 234; mean age 23 years, SD = 6.26; 69.4% White, 14.5% Hispanic, 4.7% African-American) who had placed more importance on role transition markers (e.g., parenthood and marriage) as indicators of the transition into adulthood belonged to a fraternity/sorority were a traditionally aged college student (aged 18–25), were an ethnic minority were of a traditional marital status (i.e., not cohabitating) or belonged to a religious organization (particularly for men). These findings are consistent with the view that people who apparently hold collectivist or more traditional values place more importance on role transition markers as markers of adulthood. It is suggested that research take into account the cultural context when studying developmental periods that are culturally construed (i.e., the transition to adulthood), rather than biologically based.     

The Living Body as the Origin of Culture: What the Shift in Husserl’s Notion of “Expression” Tells us About Cultural Objects

Husserl’s philosophy of culture relies upon a person’s body being expressive of the person’s spirit, but Husserl’s analysis of expression in Logical Investigations is inadequate to explain this bodily expressiveness. This paper explains how Husserl’s use of “expression” shifts from LI to Ideas II and argues that this shift is explained by Husserl’s increased understanding of the pervasiveness of sense in subjective life and his increased appreciation for the unity of the person. I show how these two developments allow Husserl to better describe the bodily expressiveness that is the source of culture. Husserl’s account of culture is thoroughly intentionalistic, but it does not emphasize thought at the expense of embodiment. Culture originates not in an abstract subjectivity, but by persons’ expressing themselves physically in the world. By seeing how Husserl develops his mature position on bodily expressiveness, we can better appreciate the meaningfulness and the bodily concreteness of cultural objects.

The repetition-break plot structure: a cognitive influence on selection in the marketplace of ideas

Using research into learning from sequences of examples, we generate predictions about what cultural products become widely distributed in the social marketplace of ideas. We investigate what we term the Repetition-Break plot structure: the use of repetition among obviously similar items to establish a pattern, and then a final contrasting item that breaks with the pattern to generate surprise. Two corpus studies show that this structure arises in about a third of folktales and story jokes. An experiment shows that jokes with this structure are more interesting than those without the initial repetition. Thus, we document evidence for how a cognitive factor influences the cultural products that are selected in the marketplace of ideas.     

Some reflections on potential abuses of psychology’s knowledge and practices

This article identifies ten implicit and explicit assumptions of Western psychology that are rooted within its cultural history, traditions, and values. Unfortunately, these assumptions have informed and dominated the knowledge and practice of psychology across the world because of historic, cultural, political, and economic reasons. It is now clear, however, that the indiscriminate acceptance and application of Western psychological knowledge and practices constitutes a serious abuse for non-Western people and for ethnic/racial minorities in Western nations. This abuse is often transmitted and exacerbated via the training of international and ethnic minority students who learn to accept Western psychology as universal. In a global community in which all our lives have become interdependent, it is essential Western psychology be re-considered as a “cultural construction” with all the ethnocentric limitations this implies. As a counter, efforts must be made to acknowledge, develop, and transmit the diverse indigenous/national psychologies from across the world.     

Socio-Ecological Predictor Model of Parental Intention to Participate in Triple P-Positive Parenting Program

We examined variables associated with parental intention to participate in a parenting program viewed within a socio-ecological framework. In two metropolitan areas in Japan, 222 families voluntarily completed a series of questionnaires. A series of multiple regression analyses was used to evaluate the Socio-Ecological Predictor Model that was able to account for 50% of the variance associated with parental intention to participate in a parenting program. The most significant predictor in the model was program features, which accounted for 30% of the variance. It is important to consider program features that make it more likely that parents will engage positively in a parenting program. We discuss parental intention to participate in a parenting program as well as the limitations of the study and areas for future research.     

Language evolution by iterated learning with bayesian agents

Languages are transmitted from person to person and generation to generation via a process of iterated learning: people learn a language from other people who once learned that language themselves. We analyze the consequences of iterated learning for learning algorithms based on the principles of Bayesian inference, assuming that learners compute a posterior distribution over languages by combining a prior (representing their inductive biases) with the evidence provided by linguistic data. We show that when learners sample languages from this posterior distribution, iterated learning converges to a distribution over languages that is determined entirely by the prior. Under these conditions, iterated learning is a form of Gibbs sampling, a widely-used Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm. The consequences of iterated learning are more complicated when learners choose the language with maximum posterior probability, being affected by both the prior of the learners and the amount of information transmitted between generations. We show that in this case, iterated learning corresponds to another statistical inference algorithm, a variant of the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm. These results clarify the role of iterated learning in explanations of linguistic universals and provide a formal connection between constraints on language acquisition and the languages that come to be spoken, suggesting that information transmitted via iterated learning will ultimately come to mirror the minds of the learners.     

Culture,method, and the content of self-concepts: Testing trait,individual–self-primacy,and cultural psychology perspectives

Three theoretical perspectives on cultural universals and differences in the content of self-concepts were tested in individualistic (United States, n = 178; Australia, n = 112) and collectivistic (Mexico, n = 157; Philippines, n = 138) cultures, using three methods of self-concept assessment. Support was found for both trait perspectives and the individual–self-primacy hypothesis. In contrast, support for cultural psychology hypotheses was limited because traits and other personal attributes were not more salient, or social attributes less salient, in individualistic cultures than collectivistic cultures. The salience of some aspects of self-concept depended on the method of assessment, calling into question conclusions based on monomethod studies.     

Change,Contradiction, and Overconfidence: Chinese Philosophy and Cognitive Peculiarities of Asians

This article discusses philosophical influence, especially the influence made by Confucianism and Daoism, on the way Asian people see and understand the world. Recently, Richard Nisbett drew a connection between Chinese philosophy (Confucianism and Daoism) and the cognitive profiles of the people who live in Asian countries where Confucianism and Daoism are strong social and cultural traditions. He argues that there is a peculiar way that Asians think and perceive things and this cognitive pattern is influenced by a group of principles derived from Chinese philosophy. This article critically analyzes Nisbett’s explanation, his emphasis on the principle of change in particular, and provides an alternative explanation of the connection between Chinese philosophy and cognitive peculiarities of Asians. Asians combine and integrate opposite viewpoints not because they believe that things change in all unexpected directions, but because they see the world as a big system with interrelated and mutually influencing components.