Category: Culture and Psychology

The chapter “Culture and Development” offers a profound examination of how cultural contexts influence human development across the lifespan. It extends beyond the traditional focus on individual or biological determinants to highlight how culture permeates every stage of development. By integrating ecological, sociocultural, and psychological frameworks, the chapter provides a comprehensive understanding of development as…

I found this week’s articles particularly intriguing, because they illustrated how neglecting local cultural contexts can lead to incomplete or misleading understandings of personality. For instance, traits like “Interpersonal Relatedness” in the CPAI and “Broad-Mindedness” in Philippine inventories challenge the universality of Western-centric frameworks. However, there was a big overlap between indigenous and imported measures,…

This week’s articles examined both intergroup and intra-group relationships and the mechanisms which lie behind interactions in different cultures. Before going into the details of articles, I would like to mention that authors tried to tackle the issue of stereotypical comparison of collectivist vs. individualist cultures. What is also interesting is how social historical representations…

This week’s chapter outlined 4 different perspectives to analyze social class’s influence: the social-cognitive perspective, the scarcity perspective, the culture perspective, and the life-history strategies perspective. It also pointed out why social class is different than gender, race, and power. One of the most important points was how not objective, but rather relative SES rank…

From the anthropology class I have taken before I learned that culture is a dynamic concept, and it always changes. While reading this week’s chapter, I realized that culture’s dynamic characteristic is illustrated not only on a collective, but also individual level. The culture of a group as a whole can change, but the person’s…

The chapter of this week outlined that there is not only one model of emotions, which is Western, but also other different models depending on the culture and context. Although chapter mostly focuses on stereotypical Eastern and Western collectivist and individualistic or holistic and analytical separation, it is successful in providing new details by introducing…

For someone, who speaks five languages, this week’s readings were extremely interesting. I discovered how speaking many languages can activate different belief systems and moral codes. Furthermore, using foreign language to express emotionally intense experiences is common for me – there is more detachment and dissociation from experience when I talk about it in English.…

Cognition is one of the most important topics in cultural psychology, because humans are thinking beings, and the way we think can come from the culture we grew up in. As it was mentioned in the Neuroscience chapter, cultures are like habits – certain behaviors get reinforced by repetitive feedbacks from environment. Many research studies…

This week we considered rather a complicated, but crucial topic, which is methodological issues in cultural psychology. During the group discussion we established that methodological issues should vary from culture to culture, depending on how people from particular culture are accustomed to transmitting and sharing knowledge. It was an eye-opening insight for me, because I…

This chapter demonstrated that neuroscience can be and should be an important tool in exploring culture and psychology. The reason for this is the fact that most of the self-report measures cannot specify whether people elicit different behaviors because of the real differences at the level of cognition, or is it because of the differences…