Cross-cultural psychology is the study of behavioral similarities and differences between people who grew up in various cultures. It claims a significant difference between two levels of phenomena: group culture and individual conduct.
What is Cross-Cultural Psychology
Cross-cultural psychology is the technical study of human behavior and mental processes under diverse cultural conditions, including variability and invariance.
Expanding research methodologies to acknowledge cultural variance in behavior, language, and meaning extends and develops psychology.
Definitions and Early Work
Two definitions of the discipline include:
"The scientific research of human behavior and its transmission, taking into account how behaviors are shaped and regulated by social and cultural strength.
“the empirical study of members of numerous cultural groups who have had different experiences that lead to probable and important differences in action.”
Culture may also be defined as “the split way of life of a group of people.” Most cross-cultural psychologists do not draw an accurate dividing line between social organization and cultural belief systems in disparity to sociologists.
Research and Applications
Some psychologists employed cultural priming to understand how people living with multiple cultures interpret events. For example, Hung and his confederates display to participants a distinct set of culture-related pictures, like the U.S. White House and a Japanese tabernacle, and then observe a clip of an independent fish swimming ahead of a group of fishes. When exposed to the latter, Hong Kong participants are more likely to reason in a collectivistic way.
Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions Theory
The Dutch psychologist Geert Hofstede transformed the field by doing worldwide research on values for IBM in the 1970s. Hofstede’s cultural dimensions thesis is not only the springboard for one of the most active research heritage in cross-cultural psychology but is also cited extensively in the control literature.
His initial work found that cultures diverge on four dimensions: power distance, uncertainty avoidance, manliness-femininity, and individualism-collectivism. Later, after The Japanese Culture Connection extended his investigation using indigenous Chinese substances, he added a fifth dimension - long-term orientation.
Counseling and Clinical Psychology
Cross-cultural clinical psychologists and counseling psychologists have applied principles of cross-cultural psychology to psychotherapy and counseling. In addition, the book by Uwe P. Gielen, Juris G. Draguns, and Jefferson M. Fish titled “Principles of Multicultural Counseling and Therapy” contains various chapters on the application of culture in counseling.
Furthermore, in theory, it is stated that various countries are now starting to incorporate multi-ethnical interventions into their counseling practices.
In addition, several recent volumes have examined the state of counseling therapy and psychotherapy worldwide while discussing cross-cultural similarities and differences in counseling exercises.
Personality Traits and Culture
Cross-cultural psychologists have often questioned how to connect traits across cultures. Lexical studies covering personality factors using trait adjectives from various languages have been conducted.
Over time these studies have decided that the factors of Extraversion, Agreeableness and scrupulous almost always appear, yet Neuroticism and fairness to Experience sometimes do not.
Consequently, it is difficult to decide whether these traits are nonexistent indefinite cultures or whether different adjectives are used to measure them. However, many researchers believe that the FFM is a universal structure and can be used in cross-cultural and general research studies. However, other cultures may include even more essential traits beyond those included in the FFM.
Emotion Judgments
Researchers have often admired whether people across various cultures interpret emotions in kindred ways. In the domain of cross-cultural psychology, Paul Ekman has controlled research examining judgments in facial utterance cross-culturally.
One of his studies included shareholders from ten different cultures who were needed to indicate each sensation’s sensations and intensity based upon a picture of persons expressing various emotions. The study results showed agreement across cultures as to which emotions were the most and second most intense.
These findings give support for the view that there are at least some universal facial expressions of emotion. It is also dominant to note that there were differences in how participants across cultures rated emotion intensity in the study.
Differences in Subjective Well-being
The term “subjective well-being” is frequently used all over psychology research and is made up of three essential parts:
life satisfaction (a cognitive assessment of one’s overall life),
the presence of productive emotional experiences, and
the absence of dismissive emotional experiences. Across cultures, people may have different thinking on the “ideal” level of subjective well-being.
For example, many countries have been shown in studies to find productive emotions very desirable. On the contrary, the Chinese did not score as highly on the desire for positive emotions.
How Different Cultures Resolve Conflict
Grossmann et al. use confirmation to show how cultures differ in how they approach social antagonism and how culture continues to be an essential factor in human growth even into old age. Specifically, the paper examines age-related differences in wise reasoning between the American and Chinese cultures.
Participants’ responses divulged that wisdom increased with age among Americans. Still, older age was not directly associated with wiser responses amongst the Chinese participants.
Furthermore, younger and middle-aged Chinese participants decorated higher scores than Americans for resolving group conflicts. Grossmann et al. establish that Americans tend to highlight individuality and solve the conflict directly, while the Japanese emphasize social cohesion and improve conflict more indirectly.
The Japanese are motivated to manage interpersonal harmony and avoid conflict, resolve conflict better, and are wiser earlier in their lives. Americans experience quarrels gradually, which results in continuous learning about how to solve conflict and increased wisdom in their later years. The present study supported the concept that varying cultures use different methods to solve the conflict.
Differences in conflict commitment across cultures can also be seen with the addition of a third party. These differences can be established when a third party becomes complicated and provides a solution to the conflict. Asian and American cultural exercises play a role in the way the members of the two cultures handle quarrels.
A technique used by Korean-Americans may throw back Confucian merit, while the American approach will be compatible with their individualistic views. Americans will have more structure in their operations which supplies standards for similar situations later.
Contrary to American procedures, Korean-Americans will not have many compositions in resolving their frictions but more flexibility while solving a problem. The correct procedure may not always be set for Korean-Americans but can usually be narrowed down to a few possible solutions.
Furthermore, how men and women relate to one another in social groups is relatively similar across cultures. Further calls have been made to study theories of gender development and how culture impacts the behavior of both males and females.
Cross-cultural Human Development
This topic represents a skilled area of cross-cultural psychology. It can be viewed as the study of cultural similarities and differences in developmental steps and their outcomes as shown by behavior and mental steps in individuals and groups.
Only 3.4% of the world’s children live in the United States, and such study is urgently required to correct the ethnocentric presentations found in many American textbooks (Gielen, 2016).
| Culture Concept | Examples | Social Impact | Highlighted Themes |
|---|---|---|---|
| College education | A distinction between elites and | Deliberate pursuit of mental | |
| Progressive | Advanced technology | the masses, between "higher | refinement; efforts to create and |
| Cultivation | Ballet | civilizations" and “barbarians,” | improve abilities that seem to offer |
| Formal etiquette | between old and young, or | better prospects of wellbeing, power, | |
| between men and women | or dignity | ||
| National traditions | Similar beliefs and values within | ||
| Geographical or ethnic distinctions | populations, but differences between | ||
| Way of Life | Religious doctrines | between large and spatially | them; strong cultural identity and |
| Organizational culture | segregated populations | stereotyping of out-group members; | |
| stability of culture over time |
Future Developments
The get-up of cross-cultural psychology reflects a general process of globalization in the social sciences that seeks to purify specific research areas with Western biases. In this way, cross-cultural psychology (international psychology) aims to make psychology less ethnocentric than in the past.
Cross-cultural psychology is now taught at many universities located around the world, both as a specific content area and a methodological approach designed to broaden the field of psychology.
Summary
Cross-cultural psychology is the research of how cultural influences impact human behavior. While many aspects of human cognition and behavior are universal, cultural variations can cause unexpected disparities in how individuals think, feel, and act.
Frequently Asked Questions
People usually ask many questions about cross-cultural psychology. A few of them are discussed below:
1. What is the meaning of memory?
Memory is the process of bringing information into the world around us, correcting it, storing it, and later remembering that information, sometimes many years later. A person’s memory is often compared to that of a computer memory system or in the closet.
2. What is memory psychology?
Memory is the ability to enter information, save it, and remember it later. In psychology, memory is divided into three categories: coding, storage, and retrieval. Problems can transpire at any stage of the process.
3. What are the three stages of memory?
The brain has three stages of memory processes:
sensory register
short-term memory
long-term memory.
4. How is memory stored?
Memories are not saved in just one part of the brain. Different types are stored in different, connected brain regions. Apparent memories, such as car memories, depending on the basal ganglia and the cerebellum. Temporary working memory is highly dependent on the prefrontal cortex.
5. Is all memory stored in your brain?
There is not a single part in the brain that stores all your memories; different areas of the brain state and store different types of memories, and different processes can play individually.
Conclusion
Cross-cultural psychology is also becoming a more significant issue as academics try to understand the distinctions and connections between people from different cultures throughout the world. The International Association of Cross-Cultural Psychology (IACCP) was founded in 1972, and this area of psychology has grown and evolved since then.