Cultural Psychology

zaawansowany

PS_W02

PS_W03

PS_K03

The aim of this class is to understand the cultural psychological approaches and it’s evidence that has been made during the 90s onward. Key messages of the class are to appreciate those theoretical perspectives and use those advantages in order to understand that the field of psychology had and still has frontiers to reveal cultural underpinnings in cognitive, affective, and motivational functions, and be cautious against blind generalization of psychological theories across cultures.

I will teach mainly relying on evidence from cultural psychological studies comparing mainly North America to Japan, in order to give insight as to how North American bound psychological studies of the 20th century had inherent limitation in completing the understanding of human cognition, emotion, motivation in context.

For the 1st unit, the concept of culture in cultural psychological studies will be introduced. After the 2nd unit, seminal studies revolving around culture and selfhood will be lectured. Specifically, the 2nd unit will introduce culture and language, the 3rd and 4th unit will introduce culture and cognition. The 5th will be devoted for culture and development, and 6th to 7th will be devoted for culture and self. The 8th to 9th will be devoted for culture and emotion, particularly on evolutionary perspective. The 10th to 11th will be devoted for culture and emotion, particularly on cultural meaning perspective. The 12th through 14th will be devoted for culture and well-being. The final class will be used for the final test.

We will start from discussing about how the meaning of things, or ideas, are dependent on our language and cultural meanings attached, and how those meanings may shape how we tend to think, by comparing cultures that attach different meanings to fundamental concepts such as colour of an object or time. Then, we move on to discuss how our ways of recognition of the world can be linked to cultural understandings of the world, which occupies the often ignored, but basic process as to how we come to understand what a person, people, or self, are. Specifically, we will tap into the ways people view the scenery, view the behaviour of anonymous agents, and tend to use specific styles of thought, not necessarily with conscious reflection. Given the automated personhood in function, our causal attribution, self-esteem, optimism, cognitive dissonance, the cornerstones of social psychological findings and has implications to cognitive and clinical fields, are bound to the ways in which cultural meaning allows them to be. Finally, I will arrive at culture and well-being research, the field flourished out of positive psychological movement, and greatly informed by cross-cultural, and cultural psychological studies. Here, my recent investigations on cultural happiness will be discussed. Also, its most recent investigations involving biological indicators will be discussed, in order to stir up exploratory insights about how culture is entangled with our biology, the universal make up in humans that is open to environmental impacts.

- Heine, S. J., Kitayama, S., Lehman, D. R., Takata, T., Ide, E., Leung, C., & Matsumoto, H. (2001). Divergent consequences of success and failure in Japan and North America: An investigation of self-improving motivations and malleable selves. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81(4), 599–615.

- Hitokoto, H. & Uchida, Y. J (2015). Interdependent happiness: Theoretical importance and measurement validity. Journal of Happiness Studies, 16(1), 211-239.

- Markus, H. R., & Kitayama, S. (1991). Culture and the self: Implications for cognition, emotion, and motivation. Psychological Review, 98(2), 224–253.

- Masuda, T., Ellsworth, P. C., Mesquita, B., Leu, J., Tanida, S., & Van de Veerdonk, E. (2008). Placing the face in context: Cultural differences in the perception of facial emotion. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 94(3), 365–381.

- Morris, M. W., & Peng, K. (1994). Culture and cause: American and Chinese attributions for social and physical events. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67(6), 949–971.

The course grade will be determined by scoring above 60 points (within 100) in the final test: approximately 50 item, multiple choice format questions which students will respond to them in the end of the class.