Cultural Psychology

Practise Questions from week 10

What is a study on Mental health and Ghost sightings?

30-40 Japanese ppts who reported seeing, hearing or experiencing ghosts in the wake of the 2011 Earthquake were asked to recount their experiences and was given APA Psychometric measures of stress.

What was the point of the Mental health and ghost sightings study?

To demonstrate that the grief and displacement of everyday life from a natural disaster increases instances of hallucinatory psychosis. These findings were to be generalized to other collectivist cultures.

What does culture provide?

Culture provides means to explain. This is because human beings have a need to explain things especially like death, illness, misfortune etc.

Why is there psychological research on culture?

Range of developmental and priming reasoning experiments look at how people explain things.

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What is explanatory coesxistence?

Human beings in diverse cultures can integrate multiple ways of explaining things i.e natural and supernatural. Culture shapes nature of explanations and understandings.

Why is culture important when looking at mental health?

Culture is important to help avoid cultural blindness in how we classify and treat mental illness. This is because there is a historical tendency to apply western research and mode;s. This is to help avoid the history of colonialism.

How is ontology related with mental health and disorders?

Some debate on ontological invariance in mental health and disorders. Such as the extent to which psychological disorders are universal and real.

How does cross-cultural psychology explain mental health?

specific localized expression of core biopsychosocial disorder

How does cultural psychology explain mental health?

mental health disorders specific product of the culture they arise in

Why is it important to consider cultural differences?

It can help improve diagnosis and treatment.

Why does culture matter in mental health?

In Nunavut Canada there was an epidemic of major depression and there was failure of medical interventions to support the issue. This lack of intervention was due to the lack of cultural understanding.

What was the government’s response to the TB epidemic?

Anonymization of citizens removal to sanitariums in which they often did not return.

How did the government’s response to the TB epidemic result in lack of response for the epidemic of major depression?

Created cultural context of non-engagement with help, social acceptance of major depression as situational response which lead to reduced help seeking.

What is another example of considering culture in mental health?

In islamic culture a Jinn is an invisible spirit. Therefore the perception and attribution of psychosis and other MH illness to Jinn possession.

Why does the perception of Jinns affect MH?

Can mean practitioner attributes Jinn explanations as delusions and this can delay treatment as the patient lacks trust in science

What is the case study on Jinn experience?

25 year old woman from bangladesh responded well when there was non-dismall of the Jinn explanation and there was supportive counselling and normalisations. Which demonstrates the value of transcultural approach and consideration of individual and cultural factors.

What is some cross cultural psychology that highlights the US/UK assumption?

Mindfulness in Haiti- effort to bring mindfulness based stress reduction to 48 haitian mental health practitioners ad this found that haitian practitioners were very different conception of personhood. This demonstrates the individualist cultural assumptions in MBSR and raises questions of adaptation to local context.

What is culture bound syndromes?

certain psychiatric syndromes are confined to specific cultures.

How did the DSM-5 TR shift from culture bound syndromes?

Used cultural concepts of distress

What are syndromes?

clusters of symptoms and attributes occuring among indivudals in specifc cultures

what are idioms of distress?

shared ways of communicating, expressing or sharing distress

What are explanations?

labels, attributions suggesting causation of symptoms or distress

What are the ICD-10- 12 culture-specific disorders?

They are not easily accommodated in established international diagnostic categories. Their initial description is in a particular population or cultural area and their subsequent association is with this community or culture

What is an example of 21st century culture bound syndromes?

Hikikomori which was japanese pulling inwards or being confined - acute social withdrawal

What is 2010 culture bound syndrome?

Socio-economic and technological changes, no co-morbidity (in some cases)

Japan- *Haji* (shame) and *Amae* (overdependence)

What is 2015 culture bound syndrome?

Identified in other countries: cross-cultural → India Japan Korea United States Oman Spain

What is 2019 culture bound syndrome?

hypothesize as ‘Modern-Society Syndrome’ (Kato, Kanba, & Teo 2019

Globalization and IT changes- culture that crosses boundaries 

Not a culture bound syndrome as culture not so isolated as in past- transcultural

What is psychology and ontological invariance?

Fancy way of saying a psychological trait or phenomenon is real and does not change across times, places and contexts.

What is culture?

An umbrella term which encompasses the social behaviour and norms found in human societies as well as the knowledge, beliefs, arts, laws, customs and habits.

What is emic perspectives?

Within a culture and cultural similarites

What is etic perspectives?

from outside of a culture and cultural differences.

What is psychology and culture?

* Humans have psychological capacities as a result of biology and inheritance
* Culture fits into these capacities and variations can be seen between human societies
* culture - social and influential but not formative

What is culture and psychology?

* Humans social creatures shaped strongly by culture and society they are in
* psychological capacities are shaped by culture not just different content, different form
* culture is formative but constrained by biology

What are individualistic cultures?

* emphasises the needs of the individual over the needs of the group
* people are seen as independent and autonomous
* social behaviour tends to be dictated by the attitudes and preferences of individuals

What is collectivitic cultures?

* emphasize the needs of the group over the individual
* relationships and interconnectedness central to identity
* social behaviour more conscious of presence of other and collectivism

How did Wundt see culture?

Saw culture as important but not scientifically ,easurable

What is anthropology?

contemporary discipline to psychology - scientific study of humanity concerned with human behaviour, human biology and societies

What is social anthropology?

studies patterns of behaviour

What is cultural anthropology?

studies cultural meaning, including norms and \n values

What did Bartlett find?

\
Stories were altered, participants omitted or added detail to ‘fit’ with English (more culturally familiar) forms of story-telling, e.g.remembering "canoes" from the story as "boats". \n

Meaning that the constructive nature of memory was influenced \n by subject's own cultural schema \n (Ost et al

What did Dudgeon et al 2014 find?

Historical review psychology treatment of indigenous Australians •

* Perform poorly on Western intelligence tests (QT) and Piagetian tests of child development.
* Results used to justify prejudice and racist claim of need for civilising - partial justification of forced separation mid 20thC

What did Sir francis Galton find?

Founder of psychometrics, pioneer in statistics, primarily interested in the heritability of intelligence.

* BUT…was interested in the heritability of traits because of cultural adherence to racist and classist biological theories of time
* An advocate for Eugenics, and biological interventions in human selective breeding

What is Wierd?

WESTERN

EDUCATED

INDUSTRIALIZED

RICH

DEMOCRATIC

What are some wierd statistics?

80% psychology research subjects

* 12% worlds population
* 67% of all US studies use university students aged 18-21

The big 5 and weird populations

Personality as measure on a continuum in a given factor, e.g. extraversion-introversion

* Established with WEIRD participants
* However- The big 5 (OCEAN) has relative cross-cultural stability (McCrae, 2002)
* Some slight variations at the facet-factor level (Rolland, 2002)

Collectivist cultures are considered to do which of the following?

Protect and work towards the interests of the group and prioritise these over the needs of individual people.

Individualist cultures are considered to do which of the following?

Prioritise the interests of the individuals and prioritise these over the needs of the group.

 

When looking at culture in Psychological research, we can take an emic or etic perspective. A researcher using an etic perspective would do which of the following?

Explore the perspectives of a culture from outside of that culture and focus on points of difference.

The study by Dimitrijević et al. (2018) exploring intelligence and socio-economic status chiefly found which of the following to be the case?

Socioeconomic status bears no role in mediating relationships between intelligence and wellbeing.