Cultural orientation and psychological well-being in Chinese Americans

Examined cultural orientation in the domains of language proficiency, cultural activity, and social relationship, and its relationship with psychological well-being in a group of 143 Chinese Americans in San Francisco. Four indicators of psychological well-being were utilized, two assessing the experience of distress (depression level and negative affect) and two assessing positive well-being (positive affect and life satisfaction). Domain-specific cultural orientations were found to hold differential relationships with psychological well-being. For instance, bicultural activity orientation predicted the best psychological well-being (regardless as to how it was assessed), but socially separatist individuals experienced less negative affect than assimilated and bicultural respondents. Findings were discussed in the context of the multicultural setting of San Francisco. It is suggested that future research retain separate assessments of domain-specific cultural orientation, examine the contribution of the community's ethnic/cultural composition to its members' cultural orientations (i.e., address the role of person-environment fit) and study their impact on psychological well-being. The data reported here were collected as part of the author's doctoral dissertation. Ricardo F. Munoz and Guillermo Bernal guided and supported the implementation of this study; Sunwoo Lee assisted with the data analysis; and Edison J. Trickett and the anonymous reviewers offered helpful suggestions.     

Toward culturally sensitive intervention with arab families in Israel

Over the past three decades, Arab society in Israel has been undergoing processes of transition. These processes are manifested by changes in the economy, education, the status of women, family structure, and by socio-cultural changes and transformations in patterns of coping with social problems. There is a serious lack of empirical research on the implications of this process for the value systems of Arab society and families in Israel and a dearth of relevant intervention-oriented literature. This article outlines the basic cultural values in the Arab society in Israel in an attempt to illuminate the relevance of these values for family structure and for direct interventions with Arab families in Israel.     

5-11岁儿童元知觉发展的实验研究

本项研究旨在探索 5 -1 1岁儿童元认知发展的规律 ,2 80名昆明市及路南县汉、撒尼族儿童参与了三项知觉实验 ,实验结果表明 :1儿童随年龄的增长 ,有关知觉组织策略的知识及自我监察的能力也逐渐发展 ,表现为系统观察、选取有效策略及计划性的增强。 2儿童对信息的加工不断深入 ,从表浅的加工过渡到详尽的加工 ,不仅要求补充必要的信息 ,而且主动搜索隐蔽的线索以促进识辨。3儿童自我评价从笼统、含糊逐渐向客观、全面发展。4路南儿童元知觉的发展晚于昆明儿童两年 ,但在路南的汉族儿童和撒尼族儿童之间不存在显著差异 ,说明文化教育对儿童元知觉发展的重要影响。     

The holocaust of first nation people: Residual effects on parenting and treatment implications

The residential school experience was devastating for many First Nation (Indian) people. The lingering effects of this era have been far reaching and remain painfully evident throughout Native communities. One of the more obvious areas directly affected has been parenting. This paper discusses current parenting difficulties of Native clients who were formerly in residential schools. A connection is made between the abuse experienced by these individuals and their parental struggles. Along with addressing various sociopolitical issues, a number of clinical interventions designed to promote the healing process of these victims and their families are provided and discussed.     

Cultural competency in genetic counseling

Incorporating a cross-cultural curriculum into genetic counseling training programs demonstrates a professional conviction of genetic counselors that cultural issues are important in genetic counseling. Funded by the Special Projects Fund in 1993 from the National Society of Genetic Counselors and the Kitson Fund from the Department of Social, Organizational, and Counseling Psychology, Teachers College, Columbia University, theHandbook of Cross-Cultural Genetic Counseling was developed to provide genetic counseling programs a curriculum to teach cross-cultural genetic counseling. The theoretical rationale for the development of a cultural curriculum is presented. By expanding cultural knowledge, developing an awareness of oneself and others, and increasing the repertoire of culturally relevant counseling skills within a socio-political context, genetic counselors will be able to better serve all clients seeking genetic counseling.     

Melodies in caregivers' speech: A species-specific guidance towards language

The author reports on a series of integrated studies on melodic contours in infant-directed (ID) speech. ID melodies in speech are taken as an instructive example of intuitive parenting in order to review current evidence on its forms, functions and determinants. The forms and functions of melodic prototypes are compared in terms of universal properties and individual and/or cultural variability across samples of German, Chinese and American mothers, and German mothers and fathers with their 2- and 3-month-old infants. Microanalyses of interactional contexts show that forms and functions of ID melodies are intimately related to typical dimensions of intuitive caregiving–arousing/soothing, turnyielding/turn-closing, approving/disapproving. The communicative functions of ID melodies as both categorical and graded signals are discussed with respect to the current knowledge on infant responses to ID speech and on early speech perception. According to a comprehensive longitudinal study of ID speech in relation to stages of infant vocalization, ID speech results from fine-tuned adjustments in various prosodic and linguistic features to developmental changes in infants' perceptual and vocal competence. ID melodies evidently have the potential to draw infant attention to caregivers' speech, to regulate arousal and affect in infants, to provide models for imitation, to guide infants in practising communicative subroutines and to mediate linguistic information. Current evidence suggests that the melodies in caregivers' speech provide a species-specific guidance towards language acquisition.     

General education,cultural diversity,and identity

The issue of this paper is cultural plurality as a problem for public, general education and for (personal) identity. In order to examine this question, one needs to be clear about the meaning of the concepts of general education, on the one hand, and cultural diversity on the other. In the first section, we will fix the meaning of these concepts. A conceptual distinction between cultural diversity and cultural pluralism will be introduced. In the second section, it will be argued that open pluralism can only be maintained if there is a basic common culture apart from the cultural diversity that pluralism affirms. Therefore, there is yet an indispensable role for general education in an open, pluralistic society. In the third section we will look at two metaphors that give an opposite significance to the relation between identity and diversity: the conversational metaphor and the food metaphor mishmash. The final section expands on the conversational metaphor by way of an exposition of Ricoeur's hermeneutics of the self. It supplies us with a promising concept of identity that is not in complete opposition to diversity.     

On rotating to smooth functions

Tucker has outlined an application of principal components analysis to a set of learning curves, for the purpose of identifying meaningful dimensions of individual differences in learning tasks. Since the principal components are defined in terms of a statistical criterion (maximum variance accounted for) rather than a substantive one, it is typically desirable to rotate the components to a more interpretable orientation. Simple structure is not a particularly appealing consideration for such a rotation; it is more reasonable to believe that any meaningful factor should form a (locally) smooth curve when the component loadings are plotted against trial number. Accordingly, this paper develops a procedure for transforming an arbitrary set of component reference curves to a new set which are mutually orthogonal and, subject to orthogonality, are as smooth as possible in a well defined (least squares) sense. Potential applications to learning data, electrophysiological responses, and growth data are indicated.Portions of this research were supported by the National Research Council of Canada, Grant A8615 to the second author. We thank Jagdeth Sheth for supplying his raw data.     

Evolution of Destructive Aggression

Aggression is defined as a mechanism of spacing by means of force or displays. It has evolved independently in different animal groups. The mechanisms underlying it are therefore not homologous throughout the animal kingdom. The phenomenon of aggression is so widespread, however, that strong selection pressures must be responsible for its development along analogous lines. Its most obvious functions are in competition for mates, natural resources, and territories, and in the preservation of group identity in many gregarious species. Aggression is often ritualized so that no damage is done to conspecifics. This ritualization may appear as modification of fighting into a tournament, or as the development of submissive postures which block further aggression in the opponent shortly after the onset of a potentially damaging fight. Animal aggression is preprogrammed by phylogenetic adaptation in well-defined ways, but can be modified by experience. The inborn programs involve motor patterns, innate releasing mechanisms, releasers, motivating mechanisms, and learning dispositions specific for the species. Aggression on this biological level can be observed in humans as intragroup aggression. Certain motor patterns and signals which lead to the release of aggression are universal. Some can even be found in deaf- and blind-born people, proving their innateness. A number of patterns of aggression in man are highly ritualized and - in a way analogous to that found in many animals - mechanisms of control have evolved inhibiting the killing of a conspecific. There are strong indications of the existence of motivating mechanisms within the brain, e.g., in the form of neuronal circuits, that show a degree of spontaneity. The type of destructive aggression which we call war, is a product of cultural evolution. War takes advantage of the given motivational structure of man, including his fear of strangers, which develops in every baby independently of experience and makes men inclined to form closed groups and causes them to be wary of or hostile to strangers. Based on these tendencies, man underwent a process of cultural subspeciation. Groups demarcated themselves from others by custom, erecting communication barriers. The development of languages demonstrates how fast and efficient this process is. Members of the same group, during this process, were defined as the “real man,” outsiders often were to be valued less -or even considered nonhuman. On the basis of this self-indoctrination, cultural codes of conduct developed, which allowed members of other groups to be killed when groups competed for resources. A cultural fiiter of norms was established which demanded killing under defined conditions, and was superimposed upon the biological filter of norms which inhibits the killing of a human being. This results in a conflict of norms, which is universally felt as guilt, since the biological filter of norms, though superimposed, is nonetheless working, particularly in the circumstance of a personal encounter. The more advanced the technique of armament, which allows fast and distant killing, the less the inhibitions are activated. Nonetheless, ritualizations occur on the cultural level. Warfare is sometimes ritualized and conventions are developed to prevent escalation into massacres, or the wholesale destruction of the subjugated enemy. To a great extent, this is certainly a result of our inborn moral code, If nothing like this were given to man our situation would be disastrous indeed. Whether cultural evolution will, in the future, be guided by moral maxims in accord with our human nature is a deeision men must make rationally. Although a ruthless ethnocentrism may bring advantage to a warring group, this may eventually prove fatal to mankind as a whole. In the escalating competition mankind runs the danger not only of exhausting its resources, but of destroying itself with its new weapons. If the outcome were not selfdestruction but domination by one group it would impoverish the diversity of human cultures, and thus seriously cut down man's spectrum of adaptability. War fulfills certain functions, similar to those found in animals. It is mainly a mechanism for preserving and extending one's territory, and a means of getting access to scarce resources. It is therefore dangerous to consider war merely as a pathological form of human behavior because this may distract our attention from the fact that, h order to overcome war, the functions of war have to be fulfilled by nonviolent means. Cultural evolution phenocopies biological evolution, due to similarities in the selection pressures shaping its course. This allows us to define the point of the evolutionary spiral we are at currently and to predict our future course.