Cultural psychology

"[4] Yoshihisa Kashima talks about cultural psychology in two senses, as a tradition and as a movement that emerged in the late 20th century.

[citation needed] Wilhelm Wundt expanded on this concept, and his volumes on Völkerpsychologie are among the earliest accounts of a cultural perspective within the discipline of psychology.

Researchers were influenced by constructivist and relativist accounts of knowledge and argued that cultural differences should be understood within their contexts.

[15] According to Richard Shweder, there has been repeated failure to replicate Western psychology laboratory findings in non-Western settings.

[17] Accordingly, cultural groups have diverse ways of defining emotional problems, as well as distinguishing between physical and mental distress.

For example, Arthur Kleinman has shown how the notion of depression in Chinese culture has been associated with physiological problems, before becoming acknowledged more recently as an emotional concern.

[18] Furthermore, the type of therapy people pursue is influenced by cultural conceptions of privacy and shame, as well as the stigmas associated with specific problems.

[20][21] In an analysis of top journals in the psychology discipline, it was found that 96% of subjects who participated in those studies came from Western Industrialized countries, with 68% of them coming from the United States.

For example, many studies have shown that Americans, Canadians and western Europeans rely on analytical reasoning strategies, which separate objects from their contexts to explain and predict behavior.

Asians tend to reason holistically, for example by considering people's behavior in terms of their situation; someone's anger might be viewed as simply a result of an irritating day.

For example, mission statements of businesses, schools, and foundations attempt to make promises regarding the environment and values that their establishment holds.

These ideas can be found in the journal article "Cultures and Selves: A Cycle of Mutual Constitution" by Hazel Rose Markus and Shinobu Kitayama which are also represented in the graphic provided.

One of the most significant themes in recent years has been cultural differences between East Asians and North Americans in attention,[29] perception,[30] cognition,[31] and social psychological phenomena such as the self.

[29][42] However, overemphasizing cross-cultural comparisons of self-reported attitudes and values can lead to relatively unstable and ultimately misleading data.

In fact, cultural psychologists utilized multiple measurements and resources no different from other scientific researches – observation, experiment, data analysis etc.

In this study, researchers designed laboratory experiment to observe participants' aggression, and crime rate, demographic statistics were analyzed.

[49] In terms of cognition styles, Chinese tend to perceive image using a holistic view compared to American.

[51] These statistics are objective because it does not involve having people fill out questionnaire, instead, psychologists use physical measurements to quantitatively collect data about culture products, such as painting and photos.

These statistics data can also be national records, for example, Chiao & Blizinsky (2010) revealed that cultures of high collectivism is associated with lower prevalence of mood/anxiety disorders in study involving 29 countries.

[52] In addition to the experimental and statistics data, evidence from neuro-imaging studies, also help strengthen the reliability of cultural psychology research.

Stories, songs, architecture, and advertisements are all methods of interaction that guide individuals in a culture to promote certain values and teach them how to behave.

These determine and enforce the rules for a society and include legal, government, economic, scientific, philosophical, and religious bodies.

These factors inform learned behavior, or progressive expressive systems that take the form of religion, magic beliefs, ritual and ceremony, art, recreation, games and play, or crime rates.

According to an article by Thomas Weisner in the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, "All these [more recent] approaches share a common intellectual project: to take culture and context deeply and seriously into account in studies of human development.

[61] Cultures with independent self-views (the premise that people see themselves as self-contained entities) often emphasize self-esteem, confidence in one's own worth and abilities.

[62] With self-esteem seen as a main source of happiness in Western cultures,[63] the motivation to self-enhance generally follows as a way to maintain one's positive view about oneself.

The concepts of collectivism and individualism show a general idea of the values of a specific ethnic culture but should not be juxtaposed in competition.

The self-centered identity and egoistic motives prevalent in individualistic cultures perhaps acts as a hindrance in being open to (fully) experiencing empathy.

From 2010 through 2015 there was a research study that concluded how important it is to have a variety of mental health care professionals in the work setting.

Such a way of reasoning obscures the real determinants of the behavioral patterning that causes this sex and gender related state of affairs.