Cross-Cultural Psychology
Cultural psychology concerns itself with the significant links or connections that there are between the psychology of individuals within a culture and their psychology. Cultural psychology emphasizes on the relevance of human behavior to understanding the psychology of the individual if only the sociocultural setting and context in which the behavior occurs. One good instance of this is the way religious views about extramarital activities shapes the behavior and the attitudes of the married people in a given religion or country.
In a nutshell, the cultural psychology concentrates on the whether, when and how people growing up in given cultures tend to internalize the culture. It tends to emphasize on the fact that the mental processes are the product of the interaction between an individual and a culture.
There is a wide variation in the way people live in different places, this variation may therefore dictate the human actions as well as mental sets both of which are viewed to be different from one group to another. It is these similarities and the differences that are portrayed by the various groups that are studied by cross-cultural psychology.
Cross-cultural psychology is therefore defined by Shiraev and Levy (2010) as "is the critical and comparative study of cultural effects on human psychology." The definition emphasizes on two facts; critical and comparative. This means that the study goes beyond the surface observation of a culture and must involve at least two cultures that are used as samples for the comparison in the study. Conclusions cannot be said to be cross cultural if only one culture is used in the study. There is also a prerequisite of critical skills as well as...
Of greater interest is the aspect of cross-cultural psychology delving into the links between the cultural behaviors and norms in a comparative manner, and how these behaviors and norms are most of the time influenced by different cultural and social forces. This will help explain why a given therapy cannot be used for disaster survivors in the U.S.A. As well as another culture in Africa for instance.
Cross-cultural psychology also delves into the interaction that is found between different cultures, for instances different cultures that interacted fro a long time through trade, colonization, migration and so on. It looks at the influences that each culture that is involved in the interaction had on the other cultures, and how it was also influenced.
Cross-cultural psychology does not just look at the differences that there is between cultures, but also highlights the universality of some cultures or behaviors, i.e. The norms that are common among many cultures and even to some extent all cultures. Some of the universal personalities that Cross-cultural psychology looks into are ideas like thinking, acting and feeling.
From the above definitions, it is apparent that the seeming similarities or differences between cultures or events within cultures are all dependent on the perspective that one chooses to take concerning the event. This will then enable one to view phenomena as both similar to each other as well as different from each other. It is therefore apparent that any two…
