Lecture 20 Flashcards
Discuss collectivist and individualist cultures
Collectivist cultures: Mainly eastern cultures, the focus on group goals, norms, maintaining relationships and they have interdependent self definitions.
Individualist cultures: Mainly western cultures, they focus on individual goals, personal needs, maintaining relationships when advantageous to oneself and have independent self definitions.
However, this is a far too simplistic definition that stereotypes and ignores subcultures. For example, some indians practise diffuse mothering but the japanese have very close mothering bonds. Most children in the Uk are secure avoidant but in germany, most are just avoidant. Therefore, try not to just distinguish the east and the west.
What is cultural psychology?
This is different to cross cultural psychology as it looks at how cultures influence cognitive, social and emotional development. The cultures aren’t nation based, they are context based. Human biology and human culture have coevolved.
What is enculturation?
Enculturation is the role of a culture in development, for example, the world the child encounters and how the child acquires cultural resources. This includes things like everyday activities, like feeding, classroom, bedroom behaviours etc.
Give an example if a cultural practise in education in japan and one in korea
The abacus is used in Japan as it improves mental calculation dramatically and use verbal and visuospatial working memory.
Additionally, in korea, there is massive emphasis on self control and following instructions in education.
What is cross-cultural psychology?
This is comparing differences of nation based cultures to examine whether specific behaviours are universal or open to environmental influence. Most research usually compares two types of culture and it doesn’t focus on the influences of behaviour, it just focuses on the differences in behaviour.
Discuss motor development milestones across cultures
More jamaican infants skip crawling compared to british infants, however more american infants skip crawling than jamaican and british infants. The order of sitting, walking, rolling and crawling isn’t universal either.
US and europe babies are bathed lying down, however mali infants are bathed standing up with support under their armpits.
In botswana, parents aid sitting by propping them in a cloth and the infants spend up to 90% of their time sitting or standing compared to french infants who spend most their time lying down. Sitting the infants upright accelerates motor development as jamaican infants walk earlier due to their strengthened muscles and increased hormone release.
Additionally, motor development has been found to predict cognitive abilities, language development and working memory/executive functioning abilities.
Discuss holistic vs analytical perception
Individualistic cultures tend to process images analytically by looking at the specific components in the image, allowing western cultures to be more easily fooled by visual illusions. For example, the himba community are much less sensitive to visual illusions than europeans, they also have a global bias when perceiving faces.
This also accounts for change bias, europeans tend not to notice changes in the background of an image whereas asians can but tend to ignore changes in the focal aspect. This has also been supported by eye tracking, europeans look at the main object for longer.
What do different cultures talk about at dinner?
Japanese families talk about group activities whereas US families talk about individual activities and personal feelings. Also, chinese families tend to talk about others’ feelings.
Discuss social influences about how early executive functioning develops
Executive functioning is influenced by social status, type of schooling, parental scaffolding, inconsistent parenting and the use of narratives.
What are the cultural differences about spatial referencing?
There are three types of spatial referencing: intrinsic (from your point of view), relative (from the object’s point of view) and absolute (using compass referencing like it’s north of the object). There is no cultural segregation really with this, europe tends to be more relative, africa and south america and mixture if all three and australasia tends to be slightly more absolute.
Discuss some issues with cognitive psychology experiments in terms if culture
Most studies use eastern, educated, upper class participants and then generalise the results to everyone. Even though cultural development affects emotions, cognitions, morals and so on, it even affects perception. Therefore, we cannot say we know that much about cognitive development as there’s been a lot of small minded research ignoring the effects of culture.
