Multicultural Psychology Terms and Concepts

Question 1

1.0 Cultural Competence

Answer 1

Cultural Competence

1. Awareness: aware of their assumptions, values, and beliefs. cultural self-reflection to understand any that are detrimental to members of culturally diverse groups
2. Knowledge: attempt to understand the worldviews of culturally diverse clients. the impact of oppression
3. Skills: use therapeutic modalities and interventions that are appropriate for culturally different clients.

Two critical processes when working with Culturally diverse

1. Credibility: client’s perception that the therapist is the expert and trustworthy. therapist should demonstrate adequate cultural knowledge in order to be credible.
2. Giving: client’s perception that they receive something from therapy. importance of early symptom reduction as the gift: anxiety reduction, normalization, skill acquisition, and goal setting.

Question 2

2.0 Indigenous Healing

Answer 2

indigenous Healing: cultural-specific ways of dealing with human problems and distress.

1. rely on community and family networds to care for disturbed people
2. religious and spiritual practices are a part of healing
3. conducted by a traditional healer
4. Western medicine: separation, isolation, and individualism
5. Non-Western med: holistic perspective, interconnectedness, and harmony.

Practices:

1. Curanderismo: illness from natural or supernatural areas. Healers lead healing sessions and combine religious, and spiritual rituals with herbal medicine, massage, and traditional methods of healing.
2. Ho’oponopono (setting it right): Hawaiian to restore harmony among family members. structured process conduced by elder to id problem, discussions, confession, restitution, forgiveness. All share a meal as part of a termination ritual.
3. Sweat Lodge Ceremony: Native American process in a domed structure bult around a pit with heated stones. members sit around and create sauna. Sweating, prayers, chanting, storytelling, and other rituals cleanses the body, mind and spirit of impurities.

Question 3

3.0 Acculturation

Answer 3

Acculturation:

degree which a member of a culturally diverse group accepts and adheres to the values, attitudes, bx of their own group and the dominant group.

1. Integration: person maintains his own culture but also incorporates many aspects of the dominant culture (biculturalism). (best)
2. Assimilation: person accepts the majority culture while relinquishing his own culture. (ok)
3. Separation: person withdraws from the dominant culture and accepts his own culture. (ok)
4. Marginalization: person does not identify with his own culture or with the dominant culture (worst)

Kitano’s model of acculturation for Asians:

1. based on person’s level of assimilation and level of ethnic identity and proposes that a client’s orientation must be considered when making assessment and treatment decision.
   
   1. low assimilation/high ethnic id=cultural issues important

Phinney and Devich-Navarro

• assimilated, fused, blended bicultural, alternating bicultural, separated, and marginal.
• research with Blacks and Hispanics: majority described blended bicultural (strong integrated ethnic and American id), alternating bicultural (distinct ethnic and american ID) or separated (only one ethnic id).

Question 4

4.0 Wordview

Answer 4

Worldview

how a person perceives relationship to nature, other people, institutions, etc…

impacted by person’s cultural background and experiences and is determined by 2 factors:

1. person’s locus of control (I/EC)
2. locus of responsibility (I/ER)
3. must consider the worldview of therapist and client.
4. White therapist: internal locus of control and internal locus of responsibility (IC-IR) may misinterpret the behavior of an African American client with an (EC-ER) as being due to low ego-strength and excessive passivity
   
   1. But: the clien’s bx may actuyally be a reaction to racial oppression!
5. Common bad mix is client that is (IC-ER) as they have well developed racial and cultural identity and impact of oppression on their lives.
   
   1. This client may challenge the therapist (IC-IR) authority and trustworthiness and view them as the MAN so client is reluctant to self-disclose.

Question 5

5.0 Cultural Encapsulation

Answer 5

Cultural Encapsulation (very bad)

when a therapist…

• defines everyone’s reality according to their own cultural assumptions and stereotypes
• disregard cultural differences
• ignore evidence that disconfirms their beliefs
• rely on techniques and strategies to solve problems
• disregard their own cultural biases.

Question 6

6.0 Emic vs Etic orientation

Answer 6

EMIC (good): culturally specific theroies, concepts and research strategies.

1. to understand a culture, an attempt is made to see things through the eyes of the members of that culture.

**ETIC (bad) **: reflect a universal (cultural-general) orientation.

1. View people from different cultures as essentially the same.
2. Traditional psychological theories and practices usually reflect an Etic perspective

Question 7

7.0 High vs. Low Context Communication

Answer 7

**High-Context Communication: **

1. common in multicultural communities
2. grounded in the situation, depends on group understanding, relies heavily on nonverbal cues, unify a culture, and is slow to change

Low-Context Communication:

1. Euro-centric cultures
2. relies on explicit, verbal part of message.
3. less unifying, and can change rapidly and easily

can be point of mismatch between therapist and client.

Question 8

8.0 Consequences of Oppression

Answer 8

Landrum and Batts research on african-americans

1. Internalized Oppression: system beating (acting out against the system), system blaming, total avoidance of whites, and/or denial of the political significance of race.
   
   1. may drive conspicuous consumption of good, status and degrees to elevate self-worth, escape w/drugs, food, alcohol.
2. Conceptual Incarceration: adopting a WASP worldview and lifestyle.
3. Split-Self Syndrome: polarizaing oneself into good/bad components, with the bad being the African American identity.

Sue/Sue describe 2 behaviors (survival mechanisms) that African Americans adopt to discuise negative feelings that may be unacceptable to Whites and to protect themselves from being harmed or exploited.

1. Playing it cool: concealing anger or other unacceptable feelings by acting composed and calm.
2. Uncle Tom syndrome: adopting a passive or happy-go-lucky demeanor.

Question 9

9.0 Cultural vs. Functional Paranoia

Answer 9

Ridley places nondisclosure by AA clients into context of:

Cultural Paranoia: healthy reaction to racism, does not disclose to white therapist due to feer of being hurt/misunderstood.

Functional Paranoia: unhealthy condition that itself is an illness. general mistrust and suspicion. Often related to fact that professionals often misinterpret a helthy adaptive response to racism (cultural paranoia) as pathological (functional paranoia).

1. Intercultural Nonparanoiac Discloser (Low both): willing to self-disclose to either white or black therapist.
2. Functional Paranoiac (high FP: Low CP): nondisclosive to both AA and anglo therapists and mainly due to pathology.
   
   1. alleviate client’s pathology.
   2. therapist choice based on competence not race
3. Healthy Cultural Paranoiac (Low FP: High CP): self-disclose to AA therapist but not so to anglo due to history of racism or therapist attitudes/beliefs
   
   1. confront meanting of the clients paranoia and correct presenting problem
   2. disclosure flexibility: when to and not disclose.
   3. therapist self-disclosure and disclosure training may be best for white therapist.
4. Confluent Paranoic (High both): nondisclosing to both AA and Anglo therapist with nondisclosure being a combination of pathology and effects of racism.
   
   1. combines treatment for functional and healthy paranoiacs.
   2. therapist characterists are VERY important and best if same as client.

Cultural Mistrust:

• limit the effectiveness of suicide prevention programs for AA, Latino and Native American youth.
• older AA unwillingness to participate in hospice, DNR, advance care directives (all about trusting death care) due to lack of information and distrust of whites to carry out wishes or be fair/adequate treatment.

Question 10

10.0 Herek

Sexual Stigma

Heterosexism

Sexual Prejudice

Answer 10

Herek argued the Homophobia is ambiguous, imprecise and replaced with :

1. Sexual Stigma: shared knowledge of society’s negative regard for any non-heterosexual behavior, identity, relationship, or community
   
   1. creates power and status differential between straights and gays, with gays being viewed as inferior.
2. Heterosexism: cultural ideologies that promote and perpetrate antipathy, hostility, violence against gays.
   
   1. beliefs about gender, morality, and sexuality that define sexual minorities as deviant or threatening which is inherent in our language, laws, and institutions.
3. Sexual Prejudice: negative attitudes based on sexual orientation, whether the target is homosexual, bisexual or heterosexual.

Higher levels of prejudice among hetersexual men and among older people, lower levels of education, southern or midwester, rural or have limited contact w/homosexuals.

higher levels of sexual prejudice to authoritarianism, affiliation with a funcamentalist religious denomination, and conservative political views.