Midterm 1 Material: jan 23,30, and feb 6th

What is an cephalisation factor? How about Encephalization quotient (EQ)? Describe EQ’s interpretation

Cephalisation factor: relationship between average body and brain weight of a species

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EQ: Actual brain weight/expected brain weight based on body weight

* If the ratio equals to a 1, means that the average brain weight of the species is about as heavy as we would expect it to be
* If EQ is greater than one, their brain weight is heavier than expected
* Between 0 and 1, brain weight less heavier than expected

What is a larger EQ associated with? List some average EQs of animals

* More social species
* Complex social systems

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* For example
* Dogs: EQ 1.2
* Cats: EQ \~1
* Dolphins: EQ 4.1
* Humans: EQ 7.4 (largest EQ among mammals)

List 3 proposed theories for why we have such large brains, how are such theories supported?

1. Fruit consumption: primates needed mental maps to find seasonal fruits in diet


1. If you required fruits for your diet you need a mental map
2. Food extraction: primates needed more ingenuity to get food from nuts and seeds


1. E.g., nuts and seed
2. If your diet relies on these kind of foods your brain should be bigger
3. Social brain hypothesis: primates lived in complex social environments

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* Fruit consumption: neocortex ratio and percentage of fruits in diet → no correlation!
* Food extraction: comparing the neocortex ratio of species with extractive foraging methods to non extractive, no difference !
* Social brain hypothesis (SBH): neocortex ratio correlates to mean social group size !

What is the cultural brain hypothesis?

* encapsulates the social brain hypothesis but adds this component of social learning
* Argues that brain development, evolution of big brain was part of this repeating cycle of cultural evolution over human history, involving these 3 components:
* Group size → brain size → social learning → back to group size

Specifically outline how the cultural brain hypothesis works to explain brain size

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What does the cycle ultimately lead to?

* Large group size provided predation protection and brought other advantages with cooperation
* There are challenges living in large groups, large brains needed to deal with this, allowing for better learning and more complexity
* Having this larger brain made it more efficient to engage in social learning from models
* Having these social skills allowed you to learn more from your environment
* These social learning skills led to bigger group sizes
* Group size increase led to increased brain size, and the cycle goes again
* Eventually the size of brain hit a max, it no longer became advantageous to have bigger brains

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This cycle ultimately results in increased cultural complexity

What psychological process does the cultural brain hypothesis require other than social learning?

* This process requires theory of mind: understanding that other shave different beliefs, thoughts, and perspectives than oneself
* We are learning a solution from the model, but also the intentions behind the solution 
* E.g. learning someone uses a blanket to keep someone warm
* So you can take the original invention, and because you know the intention, you can add more functionalities to it (e.g., snuggy)
* E.g., hammers
* Started with rocks to bash open things, evolved to a hammer by thinking about how to break open things (knew the intention and because of this could extend and evolve this cultural innovation)

What is the ratchet effect?

Ratchet effect: cultural product continues to gain complexity over time

What is a large challenge coming with big group sizes? How is this combated?

* Who do you copy?
* Prestige bias: attention more to models who are better respected and garner more people’s attention
* Pay attention to models that are being payed attention to

Why does intelligence have nothing to do in the discussion investigating why certain cultures were able to colonise others?

* How do we measure intelligence? With what?
*  People in Papua New Guinea are very knowledgeable about how to live in their environment (how to hunt, make tree houses, fruit and fauna information, etc)
* Thinking of south america: aztecs built massive structures using complex man
* Cultural groups that had vast knowledge and skills on a lot of things
* So for him (Jared Diamond) this argument of intelligence is a complete non starter

Is there a clear distinction between distal and proximal causes?

No clear delineation between these 2 (e.g., a week ago means its proximal), more broad than this

Contrast the proximal and distal causes of why the spanish were able to colonise Papua New Guinea. Describe a summarising analogy

* Proximal causes
* More firepower
* More immediate differences in terms of technological advancement 
* Distal causes: more complicated
* Humans settled in PNG \~50,000 years ago
* In europe, around \~30,000 years ago
* Around 12,000 years ago was this neolithic revolution in central and western Asia (around the fertile crescent, modern day Iraq)
* Revolution of agriculture and heavy animal domestication
* Focused on animals and plants that were nutritious and reproduced quickly
* This had several consequences:
* Animals can be used for labour
* Reliable source of food from grains and animals
* Excess nutritious food that can be stored for future consumption 
* Fewer people needed for food production, others can discover new technology and become specialists
* Papua New Guinea: 
* Native plants were less nutritious and could not be kept for very long
* No beasts of burden
* Analogous idea:
* Ball game: see image
* It is not as though these factors (e.g., where the ball was dropped) determined the outcome, but it constrained it

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What are 2 types of review papers

* Meta analyses: statistical summary of previously published papers
* Arrive at average of size of effect
* We want to do this because having this kind of average is our best estimate of what the true size of the effect should be
* More data == more accurate
* Very powerful form of analysis in psychology
* Purpose: summarise current knowledge
* Literature review papers:
* Summary of existing information
* Looking at what has been published, impose some structure, framework so that people can interpret what the literature is trying to say
* Purpose: clarify structure of existing knowledge

What is a cultural phylogeny tree?

* Cultural phylogeny tree: tool adopted from biological evolutions
* Can be used to visually represent the diversity and development of cultural traits
* Based on shared characteristics, applied to different aspects of culture (most commonly language) 

What is the memetic view of cultural evolution? What is a problem with it?

* Memetic view: processes involved in cultural evolution parallel those involved in genetic evolution
* Similar processes: replication, variation, and selection
* Just like gene is a unit of biological information, memes are a unit of cultural transmission propagating themselves by imitation
* A meme may be any size, ranging from a single word to a complex behavioural pattern
* Problem: definition is so broad because everything is a meme

Describe how a meme has the characteristic of replication

* Replication: meme is copied through imitation
* Imitation allows for vertical, horizontal, and oblique transmission, making meme replications very rapid
* More diverse than genetic transmission, happens in all directions all the time
* Memes are high in fecundity: makes lots of copies

Describe how a meme has the characteristic of variation

* Variation:
* When a meme undergoes mutation (e.g., modifications though misinterpretation, embellishment) or recombination (e.g., 2 or more memes are combined)
* New memes are produced in this manner leading to innovations
* Both are common in transmission of memes, so memes are high in fidelity at first (copying exactly as it is), then this gets lower over time (mutation and recombination take hold)

Describe how a meme has the characteristic of selection

* Selection
* Has this underlying assumption that not all memes are retained to the same degree
* When different memes have different rates of retention in memory
* Those that are retained more likely to be spread to others
* Memes more likely to be retained if they are associated with:
* survival/reproductive advantage
* Economic advantage
* Positive affect (e.g., dont worry be happy)
* Fear
* Easy communicability (easy to communicate or remember)

When does our input of culture start?

Starts in the womb (28 weeks \~7 months): foetus reliably responds to acoustic stimulation

What must be considered while asking the question of what a foetus can hear?

* Foetus mostly hear maternal respiration, cardiovascular and intensional activity, physical movements
* Also tissues and fluids surrounding foetus head, route of sound transmission into foetal inner ear (how is the baby oriented?), and sensitivity of foetal hearing mechanism
* Vowels: carrying a lot of information 
* Constants are more difficult, carry less linguistic information and more difficult to perceive

Discuss cultural differences in infant sleep

* Differences between different types of countries in terms of how long infants sleep
* Asian countries: sleep much less than western countries
* \~1.5 hours less
* Japan is always on the lower end of this spectrum

What is meant by the statement “humans possess uniquely high-fidelity social learning”

* Only humans possess social learning of high enough fidelity to support the long term accumulation of cultural traits over successive generations
* Human children and other great apes differ little in their individual cognitive abilities, but only human children spontaneously and effectively copy others’ actions

What is cultural microevolution? What are its key processes?

Cultural micro-evolution: comprises the details of who people learn from, how they learn from others, and how they transform traits as they are learned

key processes:


1. content biases: certain traits are more likely to be acquired than others due to their intrinsic characteristics


1. better fit with genetically evolved features of cognition (e.g., information about animals’ dangerousness
2. model based biases: People preferentially learn from individuals possessing certain characteristics such as skill or success, prestige, age, or ethnic markers such as dialect
3. frequency dependent biases: people preferentially copying traits based on their frequency in the population


1. Positive frequency dependence (conformity): entails being disproportionately more likely to copy the most common trait
2. Negative frequency dependence (anti conformity): entails disproportionate copying rare traits
4. guided variation: Occurs when individuals transform an acquired trait in a specific nonrandom direction, then pass on that modified trait to other

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What is a sensitive period?

period of time during development when it is relatively easy to acquire a set of skills

* If an individual misses this chance to acquire those skills, doing so after the sensitive period has ended would be difficult

How many phonemes are availible to us? Does every language contain these? How is infant development related to this?

We are capable of producing, recognising, and use \~15 phonemes, but no language uses more than 70 of them

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* Infants can discriminate between all the phonemes humans can produce
* But as we learn a language this stops, it becomes practical to perceive sounds categorically. If we did not it would be very difficult to understand the sounds we hear
* English 8-10 month old babies can distinguish between other languages sounds, but lose this ability at 10-12 months

Describe an fMRI study on bilingual people

* 2nd language later in life: fMRI activation for one area and another when they hear their native language
* 2nd language earlier in life: activation in the same location for both languages

How do cultural differences change with age?

* More pronounced cultural differences should emerge for adults, since their minds have had more time to be shaped by cultural experiences
* North americans are more likely to expect trends to continue in the same direction as they have in the past, whereas east asians are more likely to expect that changes in the future will be non linear
* Study introducing age: kids 7,8, and 9 brought into the lab, reading several scenarios about a past situation and were asked to predict a future state (e.g., if a child is sad how will they feel tomorrow?)
* Chinese and canadian 7 year olds tended to respond quite similarly, but the chinese 9 year olds were more likely to expect a trend reversal compared with the canadian 9 year olds
* Cultural difference became more pronounced among 11 year olds
* With age people from different cultures diverge in their psychological perspectives

What are 2 main sources of cultural variation related to early childhood influences?

1. infants personal space
2. sleeping arrangements

Describe the cultural variation present in infant’s personal space

1. Considerable variation in bodily contact with mother
* E.g., european infants spend most of their time not in contact with their mothers compared to other cultural groups
2. Variation in the amount of time mothers made face to face contact with their infants
* Urban european infants spend most of their time fact to face with their mothers, but this was less true for other cultural groups
3. Western mothers more responsive to infants’ vocalisations
4. Somer regions in Africa, Caribbean and India infants experience a daily massage and exercise regime
* They walk at earlier stages in development

Describe the cultural variation present in child’s sleeping arrangements

* North americans of european decent commonly put kids in other rooms 
* This is uncommon! Survey of 136 societies found that ⅔ of mothers sleep in the same room as their infants, and of the remaining ⅓ the majority put the baby in the same room but in a separate bed
* Co-sleeping is the norm
* Study: looked at 3 different sleeping arrangements for a family of 7, indian and american participants answered quite differently, reflecting difference in fundamental values
* Moral principles guiding indians decisions:
* Incest avoidance: postpubescent family members should not be sleeping in the same room
* Protection of vulnerable: young children should not be left alone at night
* Female chastity anxiety: unmarried adolescent women are vulnerable to shameful sexual activity, and as such should be chaperoned
* Respect for hierarchy: adolescent boys achieve social status by not having to sleep with parents or young children
* Moral principles guiding americans decisions:
* Incest avoidance: most important still for them
* Sacred couple: married couples should have their own space for emotional and sexual intimacy and privacy
* This is not seen in many cultures
* Autonomy ideal: young children who are needy and vulnerable should sleep alone in order to learn self reliance

What is attachment theory? How is it measured? What are the resulting categories?

proposes that infants and parents are biologically prepared to establish close attachments with each other

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* Strange situation: paradigm where mother leaves the room and the child is left alone with a stranger, reaction categorises infants into 3 styles of attachment
* Secure attachment: seek their mother’s presence when she is around, and intensify the desire to be close to her after being left alone in an unfamiliar situation
* confident and exploratory when in a new environment with their mother present
* Most commonly found
* Avoidant attachment: little distress at their mother’s absence, and avoid her on return
* Anxious-ambivalent attachment: frequent distress when their mother is either present or absent
* Least commonly found
* Want to be near, but often push her away as well
* Disorganised attachment (later found)

What was the predominant view in the best attachement style in the west? Is this the same everywhere else? Valued the same as everywhere else?

* Secure attachment is viewed as ideal, allowing children to function independently within the context of secure relationships
* The other 2 styles are thought to be problematic in preventing the development of trust or intimacy
* Some samples the most common style is avoidant attachment, and this was viewed as the ideal (independence is valued)
* Study: looked at Israeli kibbutz samples, children predominantly raised without their children, only seeing them \~3 hours a day.
* Anxious ambivalent style was found to be the most common
* Largest cultural difference would be in that some cultures young children are not raised by their mothers, but rather have multiple caregivers
* As a result these people do not show anxiety when in the presence of strangers

What are some limitations with attachment theory?

* Behaviours of mothers and children vary in the strange situation (might not have the same meaning everywhere)
* While the secure attachment is seen most commonly, the other ones are regularly viewed as well, suggesting some functionality to them

Describe how attachement styles have been related to future romantic relationships

generally they have parroted the original attachment style

* secure romantic relationships (i.e., easy to get close to others and depend on them) recall secure interactions with parents
* Avoidant romantic relationships (i.e., hard to get close to people) recall early relationships with their parents similarly
* Anxious ambivalent romantic relationships (i.e., wishing their partner would get closer, but often driving them away) recall similar childhood relationships with their parents

What are some critiques of Baumrind’s classification of parenting?

general critique: categories too closely tied to western cultural understanding of development

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1. Certain elements of various non western cultures’ dominant parenting styles are inconsistent with the authoritarian category
* Different approaches depending on child’s development: 
* E.g., in Asian cultures infants and toddlers are shown a great deal of indulgence with few demands put upon them until they reach school age
2. Warmth and responsiveness communicated by parents varies considerably across cultures - what might be considered cold in one culture could not be by another
* E.g., Westerners are more likely to explicitly express their feelings, kissing them and telling their children they love them, whereas Asian parents show warmth by striving to meet their kids’ fundamental needs
3. Authoritarian category may exclude one important element of parenting common in Chinese and various other non-Western parenting styles: the role of training
* A chinese classification of parenting styles would likely have training as a core component

When determining which parenting style is best for a given child, what is the best general trend?

* General trend: parenting style that is typical in a particular culture leads to more positive outcomes for children than parenting styles that are at odds with local cultural norms
* E.g., In eastern countries, strong parental control is associated with positive outcomes, but in Western countries this is less the case
* Eastern countries: overly strict and controlling parenting leads to increased family cohesion, improved grades, but less happy children
* Highlights that the best parenting style depends on what you value

What is the noun bias? Is it culturally universal?

The noun bias: preponderance of nouns relative to verbs and other relational words

* evidence behind such an idea: The first words young children tend to learn are nouns, nouns are more concrete concepts, easier to isolate from the environment than other words such as verbs

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not culturally universal! Noun bias is harder to identify in some other cultural groups (i.e., cultural groups outside the west), particularly in east asia

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List 2 explanations for why noun bias is not found universally

* Potential explanation of cultural difference: linguistic reasons
* I.e. there is something about the nature of languages making nouns or verbs more salient
* E.g., in english nouns tend to come in noticeable locations, in contrast to east asian languages
* Study: bilingual mandarin and english speakers show more of a noun bias in their english speech than in their mandarin speech
* Another explanation: cross culturally, young children learn to communicate about objects differently?
* E.g., one parent describing what a truck is by communicating how they are separate from their environment, versus another parent describing what the truck is its relation to other things
* Study: westerners tend to perceive the world analytically, seeing objects as discrete and separate, whereas East Asians are inclined to perceive the world more holistically, emphasising relationships between objects

What are the terrible twos? Is this culturally universal?

Terrible twos: Americans report an increase in resistant oppositional behaviour around the age of 2

* Westerner researchers: see this as an important developmental milestone where a child develops their individuality
* This is not universally seen
* Mexico and Guatemala: 2 year olds gain independence by interacting less with their mother
* Central africa: infants are held by a caregiver for much of the day
* Japan: such reactions are seen as a sign of immaturity rather than blossoming individuality

What defines the adolescent rebellion? Is it culturally universal?

* Association between adolescence and violence has been perceived so reliably that sociologists can predict crime rates by tracking the percentage of the population aged 14-21
* This period has been attributed to hormonal changes associated with puberty, but now this universality has been called into question
* Study: ethnographic database review of 175 countries
* Evidence for both similarities and differences
* All viewed adolescence as a distinct period of life, separate from childhood and adulthood
* Suggests that it is not a cultural invention but rather an existential universal
* Expectation for antisocial behaviour was only present in 44% of societies with respect to boys, and only 18% in respect to girls
* Majority of cultures did not expect teenagers to be disobedient
* Only 13% of societies expected adolescent boys to occasionally be violent, and a 3% expectation for girls
* In sum: the idea that adolescence is associated with rebellion and violence is not a universal

Why are differences in the adolescent rebellion seen cross culturally?

* Environmental hardship: 
* general trend for people to take fewer risks as they aged, and for boys to be more risky than girls
* Also these risky behaviours were influenced by the harshness of the environment
* Individualism and modernity seem to both increase the difficulties in adolescence
* Certain features of modern western societies
* Vast range of opportunities confronting adolescents as countries industrialise and become more urbanised
* E.g., in preindustrial societies if your parents are farmers you have no choice but to become a farmer, and you won’t spend your life worrying about what you will do
* Degree of individualism predicts a “failure to launch” in adolescence, failing to meet 5 major milestones of adulthood (completing school, leaving home, becoming financially independent, getting married, and having a child)
* This could be an important factor in the turmoil of adolescence in the west

Describe Luria’s experiements on the effects of education on thinking

* uneducated peasants in the early 1930s, presented them with 4 objects and asked which of them did not belong
* Solving this requires people to abstract common attributes or uses of the objects and forms a category - tools in this case
* For educated people this is straightforward, but the uneducated do not know how to form abstract categories
* Stuck on how the objects could be used together and not what they had in common
* In sum: education teaches the thought process underlying taxonomic categorisation (analytical reasoning)
* Education also facilitates abstract logical reasoning 
* E.g., in the far north all bears are white, Novaya Zemlya is in the far north. What colour are the bears in Novaya Zemlya?
* Luria: peasants could not successfully answer that all the bears must be white, most common response was “you should ask the people there”. There was a reluctance to generalise beyond what they could tell from practical experience
* In sum: education brings a heightened willingness to consider information beyond what one has experienced or heard about firsthand, and to apply logical principles to it, shifting from the concrete to the abstract

Are IQ tests still saturated with cultural knowledge? What does this show?

* hard to separate intelligence from formal learning in school
* Study: IQ test performance in Tsiman children, a place where not every village had a school and that this was largely random
* Used Raven’s Matrices IQ test, so called culture free test
* Study: adults who grew up in villages with schools scored on average 72% of the items correlate, compared to the uneducated scoring 31% correctly
* Big picture: concept of intelligence is wrapped up in particular kinds of cognitive skills acquired through cultural learning

What effect is seen while comparing EA and US math performance?

* Results:
* Spread for the average math performance in each American school is greater than the schools in the other countries
* East asian schools performed much better on average than american students
* Cultural differences become more pronounced as children continue to participate in their respective education programs

What can explain the difference in EA and US math performance?

* Teaching methods
* East asian children spend more days in school
* Higher percentage of class time in EA is devoted to math education
* EA teachers spend more time in class lecturing
* EA math lessons include more real world examples 
* Valuing education
* EA parents seem to view education as more central than NA parents
* EA kids value education more than NA kids
* Expectations:
* Even though EA children are doing better on average, EA mothers are less satisfied with their child’s performance, a high standard that increases with age
* Language
* Numbers are harder to learn in english than in EA languages, because there are more irregular number words in english

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exposure to a language at a young age affects the ability to discriminate between different sounds because…?

infants as young as 12 months differ in their perception of some phonemes compared with those raised to speak a different language

A noun bias refers to which of the following?

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1. People describe themselves more with nouns than with adjectives
2. The first words children learn are usually nouns rather than other kinds of words
3. People pay more attention to nouns than to other words in conversations

4. Nouns can be dropped in many languages, while still preserving the r sentence.

5. None of the above

2. The first words children learn are usually nouns rather than other kinds of words

Which of the following statements about adolescence is not true?


1. Adolescence is a life stage that is not universally recognized in all cultures
2. Societies with more traditional roles tend to have less adolescent rebellion
3. Adolescence is viewed as a violent period of life in only a minority of preindustrial societies.
4. Individualistic cultures tend to have more adolescent rebellion than collectivistic cultures

5. All of the above are true

1. Adolescence is a life stage that is not universally recognized in all cultures

Discuss cultural differences in children’s sleep

* Most research has compared european western cultured children versus asian cultured children
* Western: sleep longer at night than children with asian background
* Sleep latency: more asian culture, take longer to fall asleep after going to bed
* Also exhibit more sleep problems than western cultured people

Why is it difficult to gauge whether different cultures actually experience more sleep difficulties?

* Sleep problem question: much based on subjective ratings given by the parents
* Thus it could be that the parents are claiming more sleep problems than are actually warranted 
* Also, what constitutes sleep problems?
* Parents from different cultural backgrounds may define different things as sleep problems (difference in what accounts for a sleep problem)
* Thus we lack objective definitions - cross-culturally applicable- of sleep problems
* This brings up a larger methodological issue:
* You are trying to get at sleep problems, but by trying to get a definition that is cross cultural, you end up losing out on cultural differences on how they define sleep problems

Contrast the sleeping environment for children in asian versus european culture

* European cultured
* Vastly more likely to grow up sleeping alone in their own bed and room
* Asian cultured
* Much more likely to have grown up sleeping in their parents’ room or bed
* \*note that this does not take into account siblings

Is cosleeping better?

pros:

* Promotes more breastfeeding, which have shown benefits in neurological development, soothing the infant, overall certainly more beneficial.
* Can also in its extremes be harmful for the mother
* Also important to note that it is not like a child not breastfed is doomed to fail the rest of their lives

cons:

* Majority of sudden and unexpected infant deaths during sleep occurred outside of crib
* Bed-sharing associated with as high as 5 times likelihood of SIDS, sudden infant death syndrome: sudden infant of an infant that is otherwise healthy

How can cosleeping increase risk of SIDS?

* Co-sleeping may be associated with thermal stress, airway obstruction, or rebreathing of parental expired air
* Babies are bad at thermal regulation, when sharing in the same environment as a parent this regulation becomes more difficult
* Airway obstruction: can occur for several reasons, smothering, wrapped in blanket
* rebreathing of parental expired air: breaths in parents breathed out CO2, causing oxygen deficiency and suffocation

Does all evidence point towards cosleeping being dangerous?

no!

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* As co-sleeping has increased significantly over time, SIDS deaths in the parental bed have significantly decreased
* Risk factor does not equal cause, association of co sleeping and SIDS most commonly found in conjunction with other factors
* Cultures that do more co sleeping actually have fewer SIDS cases than cultures that do less co sleeping
* Higher SIDS prevalence rates tend to be found in places where a lot fewer people report engaging in co sleeping

What are some recommendations when doing cosleeping?

* No smoking, alcohol, or drug use around the baby in bed or for adults before going to bed
* Lots of this has to do with decreased awareness, concern is that you will not have the situational awareness that your infant is right next to you. You become more likely to roll over on the child, etc.
* Babies should be placed on their backs
* Reason: when babies breathe, they breath with their diaphragm, belly breath. We come to breathe with our chets eventually. When you breathe with a diaphragm you need room for expansion. 
* Mattresses should be stuff, bed sheets should be tight, beds should not have cracks or crevices
* Babies should not be able to fall into crevices, get stuck in mattress, get rolled in sheets
* Avoid sleeping on couches, do not them sleep on couches
* Sometimes the infants may slip through the arm, or stuck in the crevasse of the couch

Describe Amy Chua’s book

* Book: Battle hymn of the tiger mother (Amy Chua)
* Talks about her parenting methods
* Kids could not go to sleepovers
* Had to stay at the piano for hours, and if they did not she would sell her childs toys
* Lots of controversy: accusations of child abuse, etc
* Lots of cultural differences intersection

Describe Baumrind’s research on parenting styles

* broke down parenting styles into 2 primary dimensions
* Responsiveness: degree of warmth, support, and acceptance versus parental rejection and unresponsiveness
* Contrast to a parent that is very cold and not very caring of the child’s feelings
* Demandingness: degree to which parents are controlling and demanding
* Lots of expectations, rules, very strict.
* based on these 2 dimensions defined 4 parenting styles (see graph on jan 30 page 3)

Define authoritative, authoritarian, permissive, and rejecting-neglecting parenting

* Authoritative:
* High on demandingness and responsiveness
* Child centred, high expectations, focused on child’s emotional regulation
* Authoritarian: 
* High on demandedness but low on responsiveness
* High demands, strict rules, little open dialogue
* Permissive:
* High on responsiveness but low on demandingness
* Few rules, limits and controls
* Attentive to the child's needs without any boundary setting.
* Rejecting-neglecting
* Low on responsiveness and demandingness
* Disengaging, not supportive
* No limits or monitoring, focused on their own needs
* Motivated by not really caring, but rather fulfilling their own needs

With regards to parenting styles, what does western research suggest is the best one? Why might this be contestable?

* Authoritative is the best !
* Tends to lead to 
* Perceived parental warmth and acceptance
* Autonomy
* Self reliance
* Better school achievement
* B’s typology wrapped up in western ideas
* Expression of warmth is very culturally variable
* Differences between implicit versus explicit communication of warmth
* Variation in physical connect, fewer emotional discussions and dialogues
* “You just… know that your parents love/care about you”
* People often report this in cultures with less explicit forms of love
* chinese parenting styles do not map onto B’s typology well

Expand on the components that B’s typology misses out on

Jiao xun: parenting style component that focuses on training child to be good members of society at significant costs to oneself (spending money on piano lessons, driving them places, etc)

* Responsiveness is being communicated in alternative forms, not communicated in the way that it is measured in B’s typology

Are the effects of parenting styles culturally consistent?

* Effects of parenting styles are not culturally consistent
* Authoritarian parenting
* Instills fear in European American children
* Trains assertiveness among African American children
* Bad for academics for European American children, not for other ethnic minority children
* Authoritative:
* Good for academics for european American children, no such relation for other ethnic minority children

What complicates parenting styles even further (beyond cultural inconsistency of their effects)?

* Further complications: parenting with different parenting styles
* Hispanic fathers often less responsive than hispanic mothers
* Chinese fathers less responsive than chinese mothers (some reversal over time)

What category would the noun bias fit into?

* It was thought about as a universal, but is not as much as we thought that it was
* It is universal that it exists everywhere, but not an accessibility universal, rather a functional universal

Why do sensitive periods exist in human development?

Early stage in live humans exhibit a certain amount of plasticity, observing the environment and over this period of time they are getting ready to see what types of traits they should engage in

What is Toth Vijver’s model for acculturation?

image on jan 30th page 6

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* Person, group, and context variables contribute to acculturation
* Person: are they extraverted? More willing to learn culture?
* Group: is there a cultural group encouraging more introversion?
* Context: how diverse is the receiving environment?
* Acculturation is measured using psychological outcomes and cultural competence
* Psychological outcomes: mental wellness, behavioural problems, etc
* Cultural competence: how easily one is able to learn the language, make friends with people from local culture, etc

What are the 2 main dimensions of acculturation?

* Mainstream identification
* Heritage identification

Describe the effects that parental involvement, encouraging mainstream adoption, encouraging heritage language maintenance, and mainstream language at home effects acculturation dimensions

* Parental involvement
* Positively associated with heritage and mainstream identification
* Proposed explanation:
* One the one hand there are these parents promoting how important it is to adapt to the mainstream culture, but this kind of bonding will increase connection between child and parent increasing heritage identification 
* Encouraging mainstream adoption (e.g., encouraging child to attend mainstream cultural events, make friends with people of the local culture, etc)
* Only positively correlated with mainstream identification
* Encouraging heritage language maintenance (e.g., language school, speaking heritage language at home)
* Negatively associated with mainstream identification, positively associated with heritage identification
* Mainstream language at home
* Positive association with mainstream identification, negative association with heritage identification 

How are mainstream identification and heritage identification related to psychological outcomes and cultural competence

* Mainstream identification:
* Positively associated with cultural competence (e.g., seeming like it's easy to make friends with local culture people)
* Heritage and mainstream identification
* Both are positively associated with psychological outcomes

What is a child’s mesosystem? How does it relate to acculturation?

Child is surrounded by close others, parent, teachers, friends, all of these close others make a microsystem surrounding a child

* This different parts of the microsystem interact with each other (e.g., parents talk to teachers)
* These interactions are called proximal processes
* Summation of all proximal processes form a child’s mesosystem

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Mesosystem include acculturation

* Interactions between parents and teachers acculturate parents, which then acculturate kids more
* Very complicated process!

How do we decide which cultures to sample?

* This decision sometimes depends on what question you are trying to ask
* When determining whether some cultural variable shapes some aspects of psychology, you would want a culture very high on this variable, and another very low on this variable and examine the impact of that
* E.g. economic power versus charitability
* High versus low GDP per capita
* Compare people from the 2 places, extent to which they will donate money
* Or maybe you are trying to see if something is universal
* Obvious the best thing to do is sample everyone, but this is not possible
* Look at 2 cultures as different from one another, then assess relationship
* E.g., kinship ties comparison between cultures
* If they are similar you will gain more confidence that this is a universal

What are the 3 different ways to generate research ideas?

* Deduction: leading away from or out of, moving away from a theory and moving out
* Start off with a theory: overarching framework that organises and explains phenomena and data
* From this theory we generate hypothesis testing boundaries of theory (under what conditions will this hypothesis not hold?)
* General to specific statement: deduction process
* If P then Q, P exists, therefore Q
* Induction: leaping into a theory, trying to create one overtime
* Start with a series of observations, make hypothesis about future observations, once you have enough of those data you will create a broader theory/general expectation
* Specific to general, goal is to build theory
* E.g., everytime I eat peanuts my throat swells up, hypothesis that next time I eat peanuts my throat will continue to swell up, broad theory is that everytime anyone eats peanuts their throat swells up
* Abduction: reasoning in the absence of a theory
* Difference from abduction: have an existing observation and pick from a variety of observations
* Goal is not to build a theory but to explain this specific observation 
* E.g., look at symptom online and get a variety of different explanations
* This may seem like guessing, and to the extent it is!
* If P → Q, Q, therefore P
* But there can be multiple Ps for the same Q
* E.g., if you see your lawn wet, could be for a lot of reasons
* Can often lead to inaccurate conclusions
* This is what happens in a doctors appointment
* Also happens in the criminal justice environment
* Between these 2 opposing accounts which one is more likely?

What are the 2 primary methodological distinctions used in cultural psychology?

Quantitative and qualitative

Contrast qualitative and quantitative research in terms of:


1. type of data
2. goal
3. type of research
4. methods
5. sample size
6. information per participant
7. type of analysis
8. generalisabiltiy

qualitative


1. text, narrative, personal experience
2. to describe
3. typically inductive
4. unstructured or semistructured
5. small
6. large quantity
7. interpretation
8. depends

quantitative:


1. numerical
2. identify social regualirities
3. typically deductive
4. structured
5. large
6. variable quantity
7. statistical analysis
8. depends

Are quantitative methods more objective than qualitative ones?

* Not the difference of subjective versus objective
* Everytime you run a study, even when it is statistical, bias are still present!

List some quantitative methods

* Implicit measures:
* Measure things out of conscious awareness, no conscious control
* E.g., ease of making associations 
* Explicit measures
* By far most common
* Asking participants to directly report their thoughts and emotions (e.g., self report)
* Often done using 
* Behavioural measures:
* Measuring behaviours that people engage in
* E.g., amount of food eaten
* Neurological measures:
* What is going on in your brain, fMRI, cat scans, PET, etc. Any kind of neural imagery
* Physiological measures
* What is going on in your body? Skin response, heart rate?

What are 2 approaches to selecting cultures to study?

* Common approach: select cultures based on a theoretical variable you are investigating
* E.g., if you are interested in collectivism, choose cultures differing clearly on collectivism
* Another approach is to find 2 cultures varying greatly on as many theoretically relevant dimensions as possible 

What is methodological equivalence?

* idea that for researchers to make meaningful comparisons across cultures, participants must understand the questions or situations in the same way

What are some issues with keeping survey materials in the same language as the researcher?

* Participant likely has poorer english skills than the translators
* Whether the participant with good english skills is representative of their culture
* Language in which one is thinking can greatly affect the ways one is thinking
* Use of native language also affects how you respond 

Describe the cultural variation in moderacy versus extremity biases

* African americans and Hispanic americans give more extreme responses than americans of european descent
* EAs tend to be more moderate
* This increases doing the survey in their native tongue 

How can you control for moderacy and extremity biases?

* Avoiding scales with a middle option (e.g., use yes or no formats)
* Might not be sensitive enough
* Standardisation: where each participant scores are averaged and then the individual items are assessed according to how much they depart from that person’s personal average
* Allows for comparing the pattern of responses across individuals by statistically forcing everyone to have a uniform response style
* Catch: assumes that the average level of response is identical across cultures (everyone’s scores are forced to have an average z score of 0)

What is acquiescence bias?

* Acquiescence bias: people tending to agree with most statements
* Reverse scoring: written so that agreement indicates an opposite opinion
* Standardisation would also work - but still has the issues previously discussed

What are reference group effects?

* Reference group effects: problem for cross cultural research because usually we are interested in assessing cultures by a single standard
* Avoid subjective measures that might have different standards in the groups compared
* Certain response formats are very subjective, e.g., “strongly agree”

What are deprivation effects?

* Causes a discrepancy between self reports of values and other indicators, conflict between people actually have in contrast to what they would like to have
* E.g., issue for measuring values across cultures is the expectation that in cultures where there is chronically less personal safety, people would express valuing it more
* This is the deprivation effect

What are the 2 kinds of experimental manipulations of the IV

* Between groups manipulation: participants receive different levels of the IV, levels called conditions
* Require random assignment
* Within groups manipulation: participants receive more than one kinds of the IV, every participant receives all the levels

Are cross cultural studies experimental?

In cross cultural studies the IV of cultural background is not manipulated because it cannot be, making these types of studies quasi experiments

How can within group quasi experimental design reduce response bias concern?

* E.g., Jamaican versus Indian views on high status persons
* Experimental approach with multiple conditions: first participant would rate the high status person and in the 2nd a person a moderate social status, and in the 3rd someone of low social status
* Now you can evaluate within cultures, seeing whether indians evaluated the high status person significantly more positively than either the low or moderate status person
* Protected from response biases
* Then compare the magnitude of impact between cultures 
* Difference between comparing the pattern of means across cultures versus the magnitude of means across cultures (which is problematic)

What is situation sampling? What is its method?

* Situation sampling: uses the fact that cultures do not affect people in the abstract, affecting people rather in concrete ways
* The way that culture affect us is that it gives us specific situations we encounter routinely
* Underlying idea: if researchers can see how people respond to situations that are regularly experienced by people in another culture, they can get some perspective on how cultures shape people’s ways of thinking
* Situation sampling method:
* 1. Participants from at least 2 cultures are asked to describe several situations they have experienced in which something specific has happened
* Different groups of participants are given a list of the situations generated by the participants in step 1, and are asked to imagine how they would have felt if they had been in those situations themselves
* Participants given situations from both cultures

What 2 kinds of analysis can be derived from situation sampling?

* Exploration whether there are differences in the way people from different cultures respond to the situations
* If people in one culture consistently respond differently from the other culture, regardless of the situation imagined
* E.g., JP participants said their self esteem would decrease more than that of NA in the self esteem decreasing situations, and that their self esteem would increase less in self esteem boosting situations
* indicating that JP are more attentive to situations providing opportunities for self criticism
* Enables researchers to explore whether the cultural origin of the situations the step 1 participants listed are responded to differently by participants in step 2
* If situations are consistently responded to differently from one culture to another, it is suggested that the 2 cultures provide participants with different kinds of experiences
* E.g., both cultures reporting a self esteem decrease when reacting to japanese made self esteem decreasing situations, in comparison to NA made self esteem decreasing situations
* Suggests that the kind of experiences had by those in the US generally boost self esteem

What is cultural priming?

* Cultural priming: works by making certain ideas more accessible to participants, and if those ideas are associated with cultural meanings, researchers can investigate what happens when people start to think about them
* Study: american and chinese participants were given an independence prime (think about how they were different from others) or an interdependence prime (think about how they are similar to their family and friends)
* When chinese participants encountered the independence prime, their self descriptions become more similar to the ways Americans typically describe themselves, and the same with americans exposed to the interdependence prime

What is tightness looseness?

* Tightness looseness: refers to the degree to which  culture, or society, has strong social norms and low tolerance for people who violate those norms
* Study: submit a solution to a culture's problem. Creative solutions submitted by people form tight cultures were judged as less effective for addressing foreign problems than solutions submitted by people form loose cultures
* Opposite pattern for creative solutions for their own cultures: people from tighter cultures submitted better solutions for their own cultures than people from looser cultures
* this is a cultural category, many others have been proposed (e.g., individualism versus collectivism)

What is the challenge of unpacking

* Finding a cultural different by itself does not tell us which cultural experience sustains it, there are a myriad of ways in which cultures differ from each other
* Unpackaging cultural findings: means identifying the underlying variables that give rise to cultural differences

What is the prominent difference between north and south US? What are proposed explanations for this difference?

* North versus south of the US
* South is more violent
* South more tolerant of capital punishment and gun ownership 
* Differences continue today
* Number of explanations exist
* Hotter temperatures
* Higher poverty levels
* Long history of slavery
* Culture of honour: a culture which people (especially men) strive to protect their reputation through aggression
* First european settlers in the south were animal herders
* In this profession people can steal all your bigs and your entire life's work is gone (whereas people cannot do this to wheat farmers)
* If your livelihood can be easily stolen and there is not much of a police force to protect it, you would do better to develop a reputation of someone maintaining their honour

List the evidence for cultures of honour in the south causing the violence differences

* Archival data:
* Particularly high levels of argument related murders
* Homicide rates are higher closer to the herding areas where livestock are raised, compared to the farming areas
* This finding alone undermines other theories: 
* Farmer regions had more slaves, and did not differ in income or heat
* Survey data
* More likely to agree that a man has the right to kill a person to defend his family or home
* Physiological measures
* When someone is about to act aggressively, their testosterone level rises
* Study: hallway walking situation, one condition confederate walked by and said asshole, ran away and locked the door behind him
* Southerners insulted showed a sharp T spike, whereas northerners failed to show such a spike (northerners found the insult humorous)
* Followup condition was a game of chicken where a large man would walk in your direction and not give way
* No difference for northerners whether or not they were insulted
* Southerners when insulted went right up to the face of the 2nd confederate with an aggressive stance

What is acculturation?

Acculturation: process of cultural adaptation that people undergo upon relocating from a heritage culture to a new host culture

What was Cheung et al.’s research question?

* Research question: is there a sensitive period for acculturation?

What 2 previous studies did Cheung et al. build onto of? What were issues with them?

* Study: chinese immigrating from the US before the age of 12 identified more strongly with american ways of life than those immigrated after 12
* Study: japanese children who have moved to the US before the age of 15 reported that american experiences felt more natural to them than those moving to the US at a later age
* Issue with these studies: participants were of similar ages when interviewed, thus the age of arrival and the length of time in the host culture were largely confounded

What were Cheung et al.’s results?

* With each increasing year of age of immigration, people who had been in Canada the average length of time scored lower on mainstream identification
* Controlling for years in canada, age of immigration was negatively correlated with acculturation level
* Years in canada significantly increase acculturation only for an AOI of 1-15 years, not for older AOIs

Discuss the cultural variability of the acquiescence bias

Participants in east asia are more susceptible for to this bias, especially when they do not understand the question fully, they will try to agree

What are some solutions to socially desirable responding?

* Solutions: 
* administer questionnaire anonymously, ensure anonymity
* Use more neutral items to describe both positive and negative characteristics
* E.g., rating how friendly you are, versus asking “I am comfortable talking to people whom I do not know well”
* Use a separate measure to assess participants’ tendency to engage in socially desirable responding
* Control for these in statistical analyses

When culturally european participants engage in socially desirable responding how do they tend to do it? How about EA cultures? How is this combated?

* european/european americans if they engage in social desirable responding they tend to do it through self deception
* east asian american/ canadian participants tend to do this type of responding in the form of image management

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* Paulhus deception scale (T/F): filled with items that either people who usually have done or never would have done, key words are ALWAYS or NEVER. It is very unlikely for instance of people who have never sworn
* True or false answers
* Lying on their behaviours on this test is indicative of some level of socially desirable responding which can be used as a control

What are solutions to the reference group effect?

* Solution 1: make questions more objective/concrete (e.g., behavioural or physiological measures)
* E.g., measure height rather than ask if they are tall, measure heart rate rather than ask whether they are excited, etc
* Reference group primarily an issue when dealing with subjective judgements
* Use specific context based behaviours or scenarios rather than abstract psychological concepts (e.g., emotions or traits)
* Rather than asking whether someone is conservative, ask the degree to which they believe its wrong to engage in premarital sex