cross-cultural exam 2

Moral Skepticism

there are no known absolute moral values: we endorse moral values simply because they are ours

Correlation of IQ Scores of Family Members

there is a correlation between relatedness and IQ

Cultural Formulation Interview

• 16 questions that focuses on individual experience and social context - Assess cultural factors using a person-centered approach) - 12 Supplementary Modules to the CFI, which provide additional questions to flesh out domains assessed briefly in the 16-item CFI (e.g., cultural, spiritual, religious identity)

Assumptions about intelligence

• Aggregate mean differences between groups between groups are not predictive of differences between individuals. • Acknowledging that genetic factors contribute to intelligence does not mean that differences observed between cultural/national/regional/ethnic groups are genetic. - Preliminary research suggest that hundreds of genes that may contribute to intelligence, these genes are not correlated with race (or ways our culture defines race, such as skin color) - Probably no specific gene for "intelligence" - Incredible heterogeneity within groups (more variation within than between)

Object Categorization

• Americans: categories: • Pig and Dog are both examples of animals • Chinese and Koreans: relationship: • Pig eats corn

Cognitive Styles: Analytic vs. Holistic Reasoning

• Analytic: - Focus on object and attributes - Use attributes to categorize - Use universal laws about categories to model • Holistic: - Focus on field in which object is located - Relationship between object and field to predict and explain - Absence of universal laws

Effects of Discrimination on Intelligence

• Burakumin people of Japan are (were?) severely discriminated against. • Their IQ scores are 10 to 15 points lower than non-Burakumin.

Why are people so vehement?

• Can learning (the right) language help you think better? Can failing to learn it hinder thought? - Education: language as a tool - Ethnocentrism: judging some languages as inferior

Sternberg's Triarchic Theory

• Contextual Intelligence (Practical Intelligence): - "Streetsmarts" - Adaptation to one's environment • Componential Intelligence (Analytical Intelligence): - Executive Control - Basic mental processes - Elements of Componential Intelligence measured by traditional IQ tests • Experiential Intelligence (Creative Intelligence): - Performance varies based on the novelty of a task - One's experiences within a culture lead to differential performance - Reflects the ability to cope flexibly and creatively with problems

Darwin vs. Anthropologists of the time

• Darwin: - Emotions are biologically based and evolutionarily adaptive - Facial expressions of emotion have communicative and adaptive value • Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, Jean Briggs: - Emotions are culture specific, learned - "Politically correct" viewpoint of the time - Backlash against "Social-Darwinism" after WWII

Sleep paralysis

• Duringsleepparalysis,apersonexperiences an "out of sequence" REM state. - In REM sleep, we dream and our minds shut off the physical control of the body; we're supposed to be temporarily paralyzed but not conscious. - Sleep paralysis: it is a mix of brain states that are normally held separate. - In Canada, China, England, Japan and Nigeria, 20% to 60% of individuals reported having experienced sleep paralysis at least once in their lifetime

Understanding our own ethnocentrism

- Understanding our own ethnocentrism - Reminder: We are all ethnocentric - We interpret the behaviors and actions of others through our own cultural lens - Our judgment of "right" and "wrong" (mostly) depends on our cultural background - Not (necessarily) wrong in all cases- be aware of it - Perspective taking

History of sex / gender in psych

- Parallels with research on culture on psychology - Psychological research 30-40 years ago conducted on men which raised questions about whether it was applicable to women - Women were included as participants - Research on sex differences

Brideprice and Dowry

Brideprice - Groom pays bride's family Dowry - Bride's family pays groom's family In Ghana, both systems practiced: Research suggests that when the groom's family pays a brideprice, more likely to see domestic violence (see wives as being "owned"; like an object/property)

Domestic Violence

The World Health Organization reports that 40-70% of women murdered in the US, Canada, Australia, and Israel were killed by their husbands or male partners In 9 Caribbean countries, 48% of women say their first sexual experience was forced or "somewhat forced" (UN, 2002) In the US, battery is the leading cause of injury to adult women; 700,000 cases are reported each year (US Dept. of Justice) Leading women's rights organization in Pakistan concludes that at least 80% of women experience domestic violence

The Whorfian question/Sapir-Whorf hypothesis

"Are our own concepts of time, space, and matter given in substantially the same form by experience to all men, or are they in part conditioned by the structure of particular languages?"

DSM V

"Culture-bound syndromes" replaced by : • (1) Cultural syndromes: "clusters of symptoms and attributions that tend to co-occur among individuals in specific cultural groups,. . . that are recognized locally as coherent patterns of experience" • (2) Cultural idioms of distress: "ways of expressing distress that may not involve specific symptoms or syndromes, but that provide collective, shared ways of experiencing and talking about personal or social concerns" • (3) Cultural explanations of distress or perceived causes: "labels, attributions, or features of an explanatory model that indicate culturally recognized meaning or etiology for symptoms, illness, or distress"

Does language affect thought? Some people seem to think not

"There is no scientific evidence that languages dramatically affect their speakers' way of thinking.... The idea that language shapes thinking seemed plausible when scientists were in the dark about how thinking works or even how to study it. Now that cognitive scientists know how to think about thinking, there is less of a temptation to equate it with language...."

Major Depression

- A mood disorder involving disturbances in emotion (excessive sadness), behavior (loss of interest in one's usual activities), cognition (thoughts of hopelessness), and body function (fatigue and loss of appetite). - Universal Core Symptoms: • Dysphoria • Anxiety • Tension • Lack of energy • Ideas of insufficiency - differences in rates of depression across cultures

Subjective Well-Being (SWB)

- A person's perception and self-judgement of his/her health and well-being - Positively related to physical health - People reporting higher SWB have stronger immune systems, fewer heart attacks, and less artery blockage - Tend to engage in healthier lifestyles - Higher SWB is predicted by material wealth, one's sense of autonomy, and connection to others

Are there cross-cultural differences in recognition accuracy rates?

- Americans better at recognizing anger, disgust, fear, and sadness than Japanese - Cultural source of these differences may be individualism - Individualism associated with better recognition of anger, fear, and happiness

Determining right and wrong

- An important part of belonging to a culture - Universal human rights? - Creating change may not be possible without understanding cultural systems in which practices take place. - Comparing cultures allows us to see what factors relate to which outcomes

Lactase: An Apparent Paradox?

- Anthropological evidence places the advent of pastoralism at 10,500 to 6,500 years ago. - However, genetic research says the lactase persistence trait did not become widespread in Europe until 7,000 to 5,000 years ago. - This suggests that for several thousand years some humans were milking sheep, goats, cows, or camels despite being unable to digest milk. What was going on? - In Africa, lactase persistence evolved independently from the European lineage. The mutations responsible for lactase persistence are different - Lactase persistence is thought to have arisen and spread through two types of natural selection: positive (selection for advantageous traits) and negative (selection against disadvantageous traits)

Can the Piraha represent exact numerosities despite the lack of labels or intermediate counting systems?

- Apparently, the Pirahã may not be able to represent exact numerosity - do better when they have a model to copy?

How do people think about time?

- Are we thinking in terms of space, or is that just a way of speaking about it? - Change spatial thinking -> change temporal thinking?

Marriage Systems

- Arranged marriages are more common in cultures with extended family systems. - Some have argued that social pressures from an extended family system keep a relationship together. - Love marriages are more likely in cultures with nuclear family structures. - In the absence of this pressure, love serves as the glue that maintains a relationship. - Most arranged marriages end up becoming loving relationships, even if they start out without love.

gene-culture co-evolution theory

- As ideas, knowledge, and skills are transmitted via social learning across generations within a society, some aspects of this cultural heritage are more likely to promote survival of the group than others and therefore will be subject to the pressures of natural selection. - genes and culture influence each other

Acquired Biological Variability—Height

- Average height of people in different countries around the world has also changed dramatically in recent times such that genetic factors alone cannot account for these changes. - Late 19th century: Average European American male = 5'8" - Average Dutch male = 5'5" - Today: Average European American male = 5'10" Average Dutch male = 6'1" What happened? Economic wealth of a country has close ties with the height of its people. - More wealth brings healthier diet (more vitamins and nutrients), especially at ages when growth spurts occur. - Fluctuations of countries' heights across time have coincided with broad societal changes that have an impact on diet.

Life Expectancy

- Average number of years a person is expected to live from birth - Differences in wealth and resources in a country affects its life expectancy rate - Disparities can vary widely within one country - Socio-economic status, cultural practices, adversity, etc.

Culture, Body Shape, and Eating Disorders

- Body shape ideals and body dissatisfaction - Predictors of eating disorders - Body weight standards and dissatisfaction are linked to socio-economic status: Heavier figures are preferred in lower SES countries Thinner bodies are preferred in higher SES countries - Cultural values, beliefs, and opinions about wealth, beauty, and power impact attitudes toward eating, thinness, and obesity

Role of entity/incremental beliefs on improvements in academic performance over two-year period

- Children who naturally held incremental beliefs show more gains in academic motivation - Intervention: taught a group of children to believe in incremental theory • Showed increase in motivation, and increase in grade (compared to decrease in grades in the control group) - Many studies (and anecdotal evidence) suggest that Asian cultures are more likely to foster incremental beliefs. • Parents and teachers who foster incremental beliefs encourage children to work harder

Eyetracking (Chua and Nisbett, 2005)

- Chinese have poorer memory for old objects in new backgrounds p = .03 - Chinese made more saccades (eye movements) to the background than Americans. There was no difference in number of saccades to the object. - Americans have longer fixations than Chinese (p = .01). Compared to Chinese, Americans also have substantially longer fixations on objects than on backgrounds (p = .02).

Universals of Physical Attractiveness

- Clear complexion - Bilateral symmetry - Average features Researchers found that, when averaging Japanese faces with Australian faces together (creating Eurasian faces), these Eurasian faces were seen as more attractive than their component faces

Cultural neuroscience

- Combines recent advances in neuroscience with principles of cultural psychology and population genetics - Helps understand the dynamic relations between culture, behavior, mind, brain, and genes

Aggressiveness

- Common gender stereotype is that males are more aggressive than females - Support for this stereotype in all cultures exists - Males account for disproportionate amount of violent crime in industrialized and nonindustrialized societies - Culture and environment can act to encourage or discourage emergence of aggressiveness

Waist-hip-ratio and female attractiveness

- Cross-cultural studies find that men worldwide are generally attracted to women who have a lower waist-to-hip ratio. - The most desirable waist-to-hip ratio appears to be 0.7. - Evolutionary psychologists contend that this is universally perceived as attractive because it is a biologically accurate indicator that the woman is young and fertile but currently not pregnant-and therefore sexually available. - Additional cross-cultural research indicates that this preference is sensitive to the reliability of a culture's food supply. (if food is unreliable, preference for heavier body types)

Hieder(1972)

- Dani tribe of New Guinea use only two color names - Still had no difficulty in recognizing color chips that were from an initial presentation from among distractors even though they had no names for the colors. - Additionally, they were better at recognizing focal colors (e.g., the best example of blue) than non- focal colors (just as English speakers are) - These data do not support the strong view of Whorf's hypothesis

Cultural Differences in Judging Emotions in Others

- Decoding rules: Rules on how emotional expressions are recognized - Ingroup advantage: Ability to recognize emotions of others of same culture better than those from different culture (currently limited empirical evidence) - Cultural differences in inferences about emotional experiences underlying expressions

Health disparities

- Differences in health outcomes by groups - Can result from social factors

Cultural Discrepancies and Physical Health

- Discrepancy between one's personal cultural values and those of society produces stress - Leads to negative health outcomes - Discrepancies between self and society's cultural values correlated with greater need for coping - Coping strategies were correlated with depression and anxiety

Does matching ethnic minority clients with mental health professionals of the same background help?

- Drop-out rates are lowered - More sessions are attended - But, except for working with monolingual non- English speaking clients, outcomes are similar, whether or not there is a match

Culture and attention: the frame-line task

- East Asians performed the relative task better than the absolute task. - North Americans performed the absolute task better than the relative task.

The Original Display Rule Study

- Ekman (1972), Friesen (1972): American and Japanese participants viewed highly stressful films in two conditions: alone and with the experimenter - Americans showed disgust in both conditions - Japanese smiled when in presence of experimenter - Facial expressions of emotion are under dual influence of (1) universal, biologically innate factors and (2) culturally specific, learned display rules

The Original Universality Studies: Darwin (1872)

- Emotions are biologically based and evolutionarily adaptive - All humans express emotions in faces in the same way - Facial expressions of emotion have communicative and adaptive value As sources of data, Darwin drew on evidence - From expressions in infants (his son William) - From observations and examinations of humans - From observations of expressions in animals - From observations of 'the insane' - From observations of expressions in people across cultures • Darwin described in painstaking detail the facial expressions and bodily movements that accompany the major emotions in humans and other animals

Brown & Lennenberg (1954): Codability of English color terms for a particular color is correlated with their recognition memory

- English speakers had better recognition for colors which could be easily labeled in the English languages - Support for linguistic relativity!

Cross-linguistic similarity judgments (man kicking soccer ball)

- English speakers rated different actor, same tense as more similar - Indonesian speakers rated same actor, different tense as more similar - can prime bilingual speakers to "think" in one language or the other

The Case of the Metaphor of Time

- English speakers: think of time as moving from left to right (moving forward) - Mandarin speakers: think of time as moving downward

When facing failure.....

- Entity self-theorists respond by giving up: learned helplessness. - Incremental self- theorists become more motivated to improve when encountering challenging tasks.

Evidence for universality in expressive behavior in developmental literature

- Field et al. (1982). Babies not only make facial expressions, but can also discriminate among happiness, sadness, and surprise, and also imitate adults' expressions. - Newborns smile, cry and show distaste; other negative emotions expressed via undifferentiated negative expressions - By age two, express anger and sadness - By preschool, express all basic emotion

Universality Studies

- Four studies that found evidence for universality of emotional expressions (supporting Darwin) - These studies provided initial support for universality of anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise

Whorf claimed Inuit have several terms for snow

- However, there are many different Inuit languages and not all posses the same number of terms. - Boas (1911) reported one group with four root terms - This number is probably matched or surpassed by skiers, regardless of their language.

Immigrant paradox

- Immigrants doing better on many health measures despite the hardships - Researchers attribute this to healthy behaviors, social support, and immigrant selectivity

Berlin and Kay (1969): Color hierarchy

- In 2 color term languages the terms correspond to Black & white - In 3 color term languages they correspond to Black, white, & Red - Languages with additional terms items are added as follows: yellow, green, blue then brown, then purple, pink, orange, and gray. - This data runs contrary to Whorf's hypotheses, they suggest a universal physiological basis for color naming

January 1998: Project Ice Storm

- In January 1998, the Quebec Ice Storm left millions of people without electricity for up to 40 days - Examined in utero exposure to varying levels of prenatal maternal stress (PNMS), resulting from an independent stressor on the children's development from birth through childhood - Child follow-ups from show significant effects of objective and subjective PNMS on temperament, behavior problems, motor development, physical development, IQ, attention, and language development

Sudden Unexpected Nocturnal Death Syndrome

- In early 1980's, sudden epidemic of nocturnal death in Hmong men - Due to beliefs about sleep paralysis in Hmong culture • Nighttime attacks were part of a matrix of beliefs held by both animist and Christian Hmong regarding tsog tsuam, that included both causes and cures for the attacks. • "When the Hmong don't worship properly, do not perform the religious ritual properly or forget to sacrifice or whatever, then the ancestor spirits or the village spirits do not want to guard them," "That's why the evil spirit is able to come and get them." • Hmong in the late 1970s and early 1980s were not able to worship properly due to many factors at end of Vietnam war - sleep paralysis was interpreted as vengeful ancestor spirits, people were so scared they died of a heart attack

Practical Intelligence

- In rural Kenya, a smart child is one who knows which herbal medicines cure which diseases, not one who excels in school - Kpelle (Liberia) rice farmers estimate amounts of rice as part of their work, better than Americans at volume estimation - Some illiterate individuals in India can use movement of sun, moon, and stars to tell time

Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder

- Inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity - Has been recognized/diagnosed in other cultures • In all cultures, observed in boys more than girls • Understanding of ADHD in US and China - "ADHD is biologically based" • 60% of Chinese teachers 45% of American teachers - "Children with ADHD are bored and need more to do" • 71% of Chinese teachers and 15% of American teachers - ADHD Working group argued that ADHD is a valid disorder found in both developed and developing cultures with neurobiological basis and untreated in many countries

Whitehall Study (1967-1977)

- Investigated social determinants of the health of the heart and lungs, as well as morality rates among British male civil servants. - Men in the lowest status of jobs (messengers, doorkeepers, etc.) had a mortality rate three times higher than that of men in the highest grade (administrators). - Low job status was associated with obesity, smoking, reduced leisure time, reduced exercise, higher blood pressure, and shorter height. - However, even after controlling for these risk factors, 60% of heart disease mortality is still not explained. The lowest status job still had more than twice the risk cardiovascular disease mortality compared to the highest status job. - The rise in blood pressure from the lowest to the highest job stress score was much larger among low grade men than among upper grade men

emotional experiences

- It is in this area that one finds much cultural variability

Do cultures vary in the parts of the face that they most consider when judging another's emotion?

- Japanese focus more on eyes - Americans focus more on mouth

Sex and Sexuality

- Major cultural differences in degree of importance placed on values concerning chastity, especially for women - Many (not all) cultures view chastity as virtue among non-married women - Cultural differences in attitudes toward sex also related to attitudes toward sexual orientation - Culture affects practices of circumcision and FGM

Common stereotype that men are better at mathematical and spatial reasoning tasks

- Male superiority on tasks found in tight sedentary, agriculturally based cultures - Female superiority found in cultures that are loose, nomadic, and based on hunting and gathering

The Categories of Emotion

- Many English emotion words have no equivalent in other languages - Emotion words in other languages have no exact English equivalent: e.g.,) German word: Schadenfreude, Japanese: Amae - This does not mean that these emotions (if you can call them emotions) do not exist in other cultures - Suggests different cultures divide their world of emotion differently

Polygamy (polygyny)

- More common in societies with unequal distribution of wealth - Associated with larger age difference

Carpentered World Theory

- Mueller-Lyer illusion fools WEIRD people because it is interpreted as arrow vs. fork junctions in construction

Infant Mortality

- Number of infant deaths per 1,000 live births - Infant mortality rates in the United States are among the highest in comparison to other industrialized countries - Disparities exist among ethnic groups - Differences can be attributed to resources that ensure access to good nutrition, health care, and treatment

Culture and Obesity

- Obesity is a public health concern across many countries in recent years - Differences across cultures in food choice, behaviors, and lifestyles contribute to differences in overweight and obesity rates - Obesity - BMI at or above 30 - United States has the highest rate of obesity

Conclusion on sex, culture, and gender

- Overall, strong evidence for influence of biology and culture on sex/gender differences - Cross-cultural investigations help to examine impact of societal level factors on gender differences What factors weaken differences? What factors strengthen differences? - Environment and biology interaction - Incorporating 'behavioral ecology' into psychology

Cultural dimensions and disease

- People from collectivistic cultures take longer to seek help after experiencing heart attacks than individuals from individualistic cultures - While less likely to experience heart disease, the effects can be more fatal

Acculturation

- Process of change and adaptation due to contact with new culture - Plays a complex role in health-related behaviors and outcomes

Romantic Love

- Romantic love is an evolutionary adaptation to ensure that children had adequate resources and protection. - Romantic love is a universal. - However, the idea of marriages being based on romantic love is not universal. - Arranged marriages have been common in many cultures. Value of love - Whether people choose their own mates in society - Marry the person you love, or love the person you marry? - Material support vs. emotional support - The need and want to form romantic attachments is widespread: study of 62 cultures found 79% had secure romantic attachments

Universality in Expressive Behavior

- Since Ekman's (1972), over 25 published studies demonstrate that when emotion is aroused and there is no reason to modify the expression, universal facial expressions occur - This is true for a large number of countries - However, until recently there was a lack of research on spontaneously expressed emotional expressions

Acquired Biological Variability—Health

- Socio-Economic Status (SES) is an important predictor of physical health and mortality rates. - This SES-health link has been found in both industrialized and nonindustrialized countries. - This link does not appear to be due to access to health care, dietary habit, or smoking. - stress!! One mediating role between status and health outcomes is stress

Culture and attention: the rod and frame task

- Task: Making the rod vertical while ignoring the angle of the frame. - East Asians were sensitive to the contextual information (Frame). As a result, they made errors when the frame was angled. - For North Americans: They focused on the rod by itself. As a result, they made fewer errors when the frame was angled.

gene-culture co-evolution theory example: lactase

- The enterocytes (cells lining intestine) of all infant mammals exhibit high levels of lactase during infancy, when milk is the main source of nutrition - Almost all known mammals - including 65% of humans - experience a decrease in lactase biosynthesis in the years after weaning - Why? 1. It takes energy to produce lactase, the enzyme needed to digest milk. 2. Typically, mammals do not consume milk once they have stopped nursing. 3. Without milk consumption, energy spent producing lactase would be energy wasted at the cellular level - Over time, the more energetically favorable option has been selected for via natural selection: a decrease in lactase production after weaning - HOWEVER... 35% of humans do produce lactase after weaning, and are therefore able to continue to consume milk and other dairy products into adulthood due to SNP (single nucleotide polymorphism) - Pastoralism, the cultural practice of milking livestock, arose during Neolithic Revolution - The gene-culture co-evolution theory proposes that pastoralism and lactase persistence coevolved - Lactase persistence and pastoralism arose and spread through Europe and Africa independently, an example of convergent evolution.

Studies of congenitally blind individuals

- They show same spontaneous and posed emotional expressions as sighted individuals - Suggests facial expression of emotions are genetically encoded, not socially learned

Linguistic relativity

- Weak version(s) of the linguistic relativity hypothesis - Language influences thinking , conditions, and how we think and perceive the world

When there are more men or more women, does a culture become more masculine or more feminine?

- When men are scarce, women compete with other women and adjust behavior to typical male preferences, more casual sex, etc. - When women are scarce, they try to appease women, less violence in society, less casual sex - Cross-culture and within-culture (college) differences - Role of cultural norms as moderator?

The Case of Numbers

- Where does our numerical competency come from? - Does language affect our understanding of number? - Does what language you speak affect how well you can manipulate numbers? - We can estimate approximate quantities for numbers larger than 3

Culture and Gender Stereotypes

- Williams and Best (1982) study of 30 countries found high pancultural agreement on adjectives used to describe males and females - In all countries, adjectives associated with men were rated as being stronger and more active - Japan and South African rated male characteristics as more favorable; Italy and Peru rated female characteristics more favorable Gender stereotypes around the world are stable: - Men viewed as active, strong, critical, conscientious, extraverted, and open - Women viewed passive, weak, nurturing, adaptive, agreeable, and neurotic Many unanswered questions remain: - How congruent are behaviors with stereotypes and does this congruence differ across cultures? - Are stereotypes related to important psychological constructs or behaviors?

Whorf's famous example: Empty gasoline drums

- by calling it "empty", we are downplaying its danger by implying it is inert, causing people to think its harmless when it's not - so people think its okay to smoke nearby

Does language affect thought? Some people seem to think so

- changing language, political correctness (ex. chairman chair or chairperson) - political speech (ex. "mistakes were made" = "we were not responsible", global warming climate change)

Emotion antecedents

- events or situations that trigger an emotion - Many studies support the universality of emotion antecedents (e.g., Scherer, 1997) - Same types of antecedents bring about same emotions across cultures - Similarity in relative frequency with which each antecedents elicit emotions

What adaptive problems did females have to face when selecting a mate?

- find a mate that can provide for her and her offspring Wasted effort is more costly for females than for males: - Infertile males - Wrong species - Poor genetic quality Result: females should be more choosy than males

Cross-linguistic spatial priming task

- fish race: racing either horizontal or vertical - English speakers do better with horizontal prime - Mandarin speakers do better with vertical prime - English speakers improve after training - controversy about whether or not these results could be replicated

Capron & Duyme French Adoption Study 1

- high SES adopted by high SES: IQ = 120 - high SES adopted by low SES: IQ = 108 - low SES adopted by low SES: IQ = 92 - low SES adopted by high SES: IQ = 104 - intelligence has to do with birth family AND adoptive family

Linguistic determinism

- language determines thought -Speakers of different languages see the world in different, incompatible ways, because their languages impose different conceptual structures on their experiences

Psychosocial Influences on Physical Health and Disease

- psychosocial factors play a role in the maintenance of physical health - Found links between fewer social ties and poor health - Found links between negative life events and health or disease states

Simber Effect

- the age-dependent increase in children's cognitive ability smaller in Arab countries than in Western countries - due to the fact that girls often do not have access to education

Genetic Influences on Physical Health and Disease

-More genetic variations exist within racial and cultural groups than between -Multilevel, interdisciplinary research efforts study how genes interact with environments on cellular, individual, group, and societal levels

Experimental Paradigm: animals-in-a-row task

1) subject memorizes item on a table 2) subject is turned 3) told to recreate same table as before - 2 possible ways: geocentric tendency vs. egocentric tendency Dutch participants: egocentric setup Tenejapan participants: geocentric setup - can prime participants to change preferences by increasing saliency of landmarks

DSM IV

1. Incorporated clinical manifestation of disorder across cultures. 2. Included 25 culture-bound syndromes 3. Guidelines for in-depth assessment of persons' cultural background

Looking for memory effects

1. Show people lots of different events in some stage of progress woman opening umbrella, man who is about to kick ball, woman who just poured water... 2. Test recognition

Generalized Anxiety Disorder

Acontinuousstateof anxiety marked by feelings of worry and dread, apprehension, difficulties in concentration, and signs of motor tension.

Panic Disorder

An anxiety disorder in which a person experiences recurring panic attacks, feelings of impending doom or death, accompanied by physiological symptoms such as rapid breathing and dizziness.

Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD)

An anxiety disorder in which a person feels trapped in repetitive, persistent thoughts (obsessions) and repetitive, ritualized behaviors (compulsions) designed to reduce anxiety.

Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)

An anxiety disorder in which a person who has experienced a traumatic or life-threatening event has symptoms such as psychic numbing, reliving the the trauma, and increased physiological arousal.

Phobia

An exaggerated, unrealistic fear of a specific situation, activity, or object

Emotion Appraisal

Process by which people evaluate events, situations that lead to them having emotions • High degree of cross-cultural similarity in how emotion is processed • Basic emotions are appraised in the same way across cultures

Mental Disorder

Any behavior or emotional state that causes an individual great suffering or worry, is self- defeating or self-destructive, or is maladaptive and disrupts the person's relationships or the larger community. • Possible Models for Defining Disorders: - Mental disorder as a violation of cultural standards? - Mental disorder as maladaptive or harmful behavior? - Mental disorder as emotional distress?

Why does polygyny exist, despite universality of pair bonding?

Arranged marriages? • Although arranged marriages are common, parental and offspring mate preferences are very similar. Polygamy/Polygyny? • Does not suppress pair-bonding or romantic love, and is much less frequent across cultures than monogamy. Divorce? • Divorce rates are similar across many "easy-divorce" cultures, and many married couples remain together for life. Infidelity? • Rates of extra-pair sex and paternity are low in humans compared to other "monogamous" species.

The Flynn Effect

Average IQ has steadily increased since the 1930's Possible reasons: - lead in gasoline has decreased

Sex roles

Behaviors men and women engage in related to biological differences and process of reproduction

Gender

Behaviors that the culture deems appropriate for gender groups (often based on sex)

The state of the debate up until early 1990s

Color perception had been an area of cross-linguistic difference where people initially thought there was evidence for Whorfian effects

Recent Cross-Cultural Research on Display Rules

Cross-cultural study in 30 countries: self-ingroup relations - individualistic cultures: Okay to express negative feelings; less need to display positive feelings - collectivistic cultures: Suppress expressions of negative feelings; more pressure to display positive feelings Cross-cultural study in 30 countries: self-outgroup relations - individualistic cultures: Suppress expressions of negative feelings; okay to express positive feelings as would toward ingroup - collectivistic cultures: Encouraged to express negative feelings; suppress display of positive feelings reserved for ingroups

female preference: ability to invest

Financial prospects/ economic resources - what are cues to earning capacity? - Cues include status markers - Personality traits - ambitiousness

Gender roles

Degree to which a person adopts gender-specific behaviors ascribed by the culture (often based on sex roles)

Somatization

Depression prevalent in individualist cultures while somatic symptoms dominate collectivistic cultures - Depressive symptoms patterns differ cross culturally • Sources of stress, coping - Bodily complaints as expressions of psychological distress • Hispanics, Japanese, Chinese & Arabs somaticize more than Europeans or Americans

Cultural Differences in Expressive Behavior: Display Rules

Despite evidence for the universality of emotional expression of basic emotions, there are also cultural differences. This discrepancy can be explained by cultural display rules

Division of Labor

Differences in gender roles exist universally - Georgas et al. (2006) study on 27 countries found that women generally did most of housework - Mothers concerned with childcare, even more so in less-affluent countries - Cultures differ in type and differentiation encouraged between sexes; gender, gender roles, gender-role ideologies and gender stereotypes Biological differences between men and women lead to division of labor in evolutionary history - Men generally physically larger and stronger: provide shelter, food, protection - Women carry children, give birth, and breastfeed: care for infants and newborns - Biggest cultural differences between men and women is division of labor in house: more variation in men's roles than women's roles

Duchenne de Boulogne

Duchenne de Boulogne found that he could artificially induce recognizable facial expressions by sending electrical currents to different groups of muscles in the face.

The relationship between cultural beliefs and academic performance

Entity View - Intelligence is something fixed and stable. - Entity theorists usually concerned with " looking smart" which leading them to become more performance oriented. - Learned helplessness: giving up too easy. Incremental View - Believe that intelligence is malleable and changeable. - Intelligence can be increased by putting in more effort. (keep on trying!) - Emphasis on gaining knowledge more than just getting good grades. (Learning Oriented).

Prologue: the state of the debate pre-1991(ish)

How many colors are in a rainbow? - Newton originally (1672) named only five primary colors: red, yellow, green, blue and violet. Later he included orange and indigo, giving seven colors by analogy to the number of notes in a musical scale. - Russians have different words for blue and light blue

Cultural Variability— Body Weight

It is noteworthy that "average is attractive" does not apply to aspects beyond facial features. - Weight, height, muscles, breasts, and hips. - For such aspects, it's bodies that depart from average that are seen as more attractive. - The kinds of body weights that are perceived to be most attractive vary considerably across cultures.

Is the concept of "intelligence" itself culturally biased?

Lay theories of intelligence in the US (Sternbergetal.,1981) include concepts of: • Practical problem solving • Verbal reasoning ability • Social competence China (Yang&Sternberg,1997): • Cognitive ability • Interpersonal competence (understanding others) • Intrapersonal competence (understanding oneself) Concepts of intelligence in African cultures - Chewa society in Zambia (Serpell, 2000) • Social responsibilities • Cooperation • Obedience - Luo society in Rural Kenya (Super and Harkness, 1982) • Responsible participation in family and social life - Rieko: Knowledge and skills - Luoro: Respect and care for others - Winjo: Wisdom in real-life problems - Para: Creativity - Only "reiko" is correlated with school achievement - Uganda and Zimbabwe: • Social behavior that benefits the group

Universality Studies: Study 1

Judgments of facial expressions by literate cultures • Observers from US, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Japan labeled expressions in photographs • Results: Found high agreement for anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise • Problem: All countries were literate and industrialized; problem of shared visual input

Universality Studies: Study 2

Judgments of facial expressions by preliterate cultures • Observers from Papua New Guinea asked to select story that best describes expressions in photographs • Results: Found high agreement for anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise • Then asked participants to produce expressions matching those scenarios, and showed them to American participants (Study 4) - Again, high agreement

female preference for social status

Looking at traditional hunter-gatherer societies, suggests men had clearly defined status hierarchies - A man's social status would have correlated with access to and control over resources - Betzig (1986) found that in 186 cultures ranging from Mbuti Pygmies of Africa to the Aleut Inuits, high status men invariably had greater wealth (and more wives)

What causes these differences?

Many possibilities - Differences in natural understanding of number concepts? • Asian languages more systematic than Germanic and Romantic languages • May give children who speak languages with intuitive counting systems a head start on acquiring mathematical concepts - Cultural practices? • Use of an abacus to teach numerical concepts • Cultural importance of education to succeed in life - E.g., Civil service tests in many Asian counties: With enough study, anyone can advance in society

The Case of Grammatical Gender

Memory task: • Used 24 object names (e.g., "apple") that had opposite grammatical genders in Spanish and German (half masculine, half feminine) • Spanish and German speakers were asked to perform in a memory task in English to avoid making them think explicitly about grammatical gender • Found a gender congruency in memory Adjective task: • Used 24 object names (e.g., "apple") that had opposite grammatical genders in Spanish and German (half masculine, half feminine) • Spanish and German speakers were asked to perform an adjective-listing task in English • Found a gender congruency in adjectives

Cultural Relativism

Moral values are relative to one's culture; there are no universally held values

Culture and mathematical performance

National differences in mathematics performance - High performers: Singapore, Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, Belgium, Netherlands, Estonia, Hungary - Middle performers: US, Malaysia, Russia, Sweden, Scotland, New Zealand, Australia - Low performers: Norway, Cyprus, Iran, Indonesia, Chile, Ghana, South Africa, etc.

How Did Lactase Persistence Spread?

Negative Selection (disadvantages of Lactose Intolerance): • Individually: Non-LP individuals • missed out on a potentially important source of nutrition and hydration • Experiencing painful, dehydrating • symptoms upon consuming milk (see slide 15), which could be deadly. • Culturally: Without pastoralism, herders must slaughter their livestock to gain dietary protein from their meat. Positive Selection (advantages of Lactase Persistence): - Individually: Milk supplies protein, fat, sugar, and vitamins, and is dependable despite cold weather and/or bad crops - Neolithic women who could digest milk were estimated to produce 32% more offspring. • Culturally: Milk is a more efficient protein source: it does not require killing livestock, yet the milk from one cow nearly equals the caloric value of the meat from a whole cow. - Lactase Persistence is a dominant trait. This is also an important aspect of how LP spread throughout the population over time.

Does language determine thought?

No.

Does language influence thought in every way that has ever been proposed?

No. (Large literature of null results!)

Ethical Absolutism

One set of moral values applies to all people and cultures

Evolutionary Timing: Phylogenetic comparative methods

Pair-bonding preceded and facilitated paternal investment. • It is not clear how far monogamy goes back, but evidence suggests that the practice developed prior to Homo Sapiens Sapiens. (a) Homo erectus lived in small bands, based around monogamous pair bonds and cooperative breeding; (b) The evolution of the multi-level societal structure of modern humans depended on the existence of pair- bonding; and (c) The evolution of longer life span, the extreme metabolic requirements of their large brains, and high fertility depended on pair-bonding and cooperative breeding.

Culture and Attention: the recognition task

Phase 1: Recall Task - 41 American participants at the University of Michigan and 44 Japanese participants at Kyoto University, Japan. Phase 2: Recognition Task - shown an image of a fish - then shown: fish + original background; fish + no background; fish + novel background - Japanese recognize fish + original background fastest - Americans recognize fish + no background fastest

Sex

Physical (biological) characteristics and differences between men and women

Does language shape thought in a wide variety of manners and domains?

Possibly so.

Culture variation: preferences for masculine features

Preference for masculine features more common in environments with high pathogen load - Costly signaling theory: Evolutionary theory - peacock tail - higher testosterone levels lowers immune health

Men's mate preferences

Preference for physical attractiveness - Men rate physical attractiveness as more important and desirable in a mate than do women - A cross-cultural sex difference - Facial and body symmetry associated with physical attractiveness - Facial asymmetry increases with age - Associated with genetic quality, resources and health in development

Stress in Primates

Primates lower in the hierarchy show greater stress hormone levels when they belong to a social system where: - the hierarchy is stable, - is maintained through intimidation rather than direct physical attacks, - the subordinates cannot avoid dominant individuals, and - they have low availability for social support.

Cultural Display Rules

Rules that dictate how universal emotional expressions should be modified according to social situation •Deamplification •Amplification •Neutralization •Qualification •Masking •Simulation

Capron & Duyme French Adoption Study 2

Sample of abused / neglected infants, adopted between age 4 and 6 • IQ at adoption = 77 • IQ 9 years later - Farmers & laborers: IQ = 86 - Middle class: IQ = 92 - Upper class: IQ = 98

Acquired Biological Variability—Obesity

Some explanations include: - Greater reliance on high-calorie foods (e.g. fast foods, sodas) - Larger portion sizes - More sedentary lifestyle - Suburban lifestyle—more driving, less exercise - Within the West, there is considerable variation in obesity rates (due to variety in culturally acceptable portion sizes)

Males' Higher Status

Son preference: in most countries, families value male children over female children Power globally linked to economic power - Employed women's earnings range from 50- 95% of men's (International Labor Organization, 2003; UN, 199). The average is about 2/3 - Majority of 1.5 billion people in the world living on $1.00/day or less are women: "feminization of poverty." - In US: majority of prestigious and professional jobs are held by men. Sex-selective abortion: Why? - Sons are source of family income and provide for parents in old age and bring prestige. - Daughters are expected to marry and have children and leave the family. They do not enhance the family's economic or social position.

Universality Studies: Study 4

Spontaneous facial expressions of emotion • American and Japanese students' facial expressions secretly recorded while they were watching stressful film - Amputation, circumcision, etc. • Results: Americans and Japanese showed same facial expressions at same points in time

Stress and Health

Stress affects health in at least two ways. - Can increase health-compromising behaviors like smoking and drinking. - Weakens the immune system's ability to fight off infections. - Some environments can induce more stress. - What about culture? - People feel stress when they feel a lack of control over their lives. One situation that creates this is being lower in a hierarchy. - Lower-SES people feel less in control of their lives than higher-SES people, and lower-SES people show less vulnerability to illness when they are provided with control

Culture and Attention: the change detection task

The Flicker Paradigm (pictures of airstrip with differences) • Japanese and American participants - Shown pairs of animated vignettes - Asked to report differences across pairs • Do Japanese see more contextual (background and relational) changes? yes! • Do Americans see more focal object changes? yes!

Levinson, Kita, Haun, & Rasch (2002)

Tenejapans maintain a constant sense of absolute orientation, presumably by running a continuous background computation of egocentric heading with respect to abstract bearings, integrating multiple internal and external cues to achieve this.

(Levinson, 1996)

Tenejapans show an interesting tendency to confuse left-right inversions or mirror-images (i.e., reflections across the apparent vertical axis), even when visually presented simultaneously, which seems related to their absence of 'left' and 'right' terms, and the absence of related asymmetries in their material culture.

Naturalistic fallacy

The fallacy of drawing an imperative (ought) from a description of facts (is). e.g., Medically assisted reproduction is wrong because it unnatural. (Toothpaste is also against nature...)

Intrinsic frame of reference

The girl is at the umbrella's front/downward side

egocentric frame of reference

The girl is to the left of the umbrella

Geocentric frame of reference

The girl is to the south of the umbrella

Studies of nonhuman primates

These studies all provide evidence that discrete facial expressions are universal, genetically encoded, and linked with primate ancestors in evolution

Ethnic Similarities and Differences

Two disturbing but robust findings: 1. Within countries, ethnic groups differ in their (measured) average "intelligence" scores. 2. High-scoring people (and groups) are more likely to attain high levels of education and income.

Romantic love and pair bonds

Universality of romantic love • Romantic love is universal and is associated with pair-bonding across cultures. Romantic love suppresses the search for mates • Romantic love automatically suppresses effort and attention given to alternative partners. Romantic love has a distinct signature • Romantic love has distinct emotional, behavioral, hormonal, and neuropsychological features. Romantic love promotes health and survival • Successful pair-bonding predicts better health and survival across cultures for both adults and offspring.

Theory of East Asian/Western differences in Visual Attention

Westerner's Attention: - Worldview: Things exist by themselves and can be defined by their attributes (context independent, object-oriented) East Asians' Attention - Worldview: Things are inter-related. Various factors are involved in an event (context dependent, context- sensitive)

Gender, Age, & Depression

Women are about twice as likely as men to be diagnosed with depression. - True around the world • After age 65, rates of depression drop sharply for both men and women.

Emotion

a transient, neurophysiological response to a stimulus that excites a coordinated system of components; informs us about relationship to stimulus, and prepare us to respond to it

Frames of Reference

how one talks about the directions and locations of objects in space

How early hormones shape gender development

prenatal androgen exposure alters girls' responses to information indicating gender-appropriate behavior

the main adaptive problem males faced when choosing a mate?

producing offspring- finding a fertile mate Men's Preference for Reproductive Resources: - Older men are attracted to relatively younger women - Younger men are attracted to relatively older women - This same pattern is found across societies and historical periods

Epigenetics and culture

rat experiment 1: 1) attentive and inattentive mothers breed 2) researchers examine brains of grown offspring: - genes of offspring of attentive mother rarely methylated: less stress - genes of offspring of inattentive mother highly methylated: more stress rat experiment 2: 1) attentive and inattentive mothers breed 2) pups switched at birth so moms raise foster pups - researchers find similar results: genes of pups raised by inattentive mothers highly methylated - it is possible to eliminate these epigenetic changes (with drug that removes methyl groups) - Holocaust Exposure Induced Intergenerational Effects on FKBP5 Methylation

Universality in Physiological Responses to Emotion

• Each of the universal emotions, when signaled by universal expressions, have distinct and discrete physiological signature in autonomic nervous system and central nervous system - This finding replicated in cross-cultural studies (e.g., Chinese and European Americans; Indonesians) - Emotions help individuals respond to emotional stimuli by preparing body to engage in activity (e.g., fear-flee; anger-fight)

Evidence for Emotions as universal / inherited / evolved

• Eibl-Eibesfeldt (1973): Children born deaf and blind make expressions such as: - Laughing, smiling, crying, frowning, surprise, startle, pouting, clench fists in anger. • Matsumoto & Willingham (2009): Emotional expressions in blind Judo athletes in the Special Olympics

Cultural constructionist approach to emotion

• Emotions are a set of "socially shared scripts" that are inextricably linked with culture and develops as individuals are enculturated into culture • Emotion reflects cultural environment, and is a integral part of culture

General Comments on Emotions

• Emotions are functional - Help us solve complex social coordination problems • Expressing emotion is universal aspect of human functioning - Emotions have evolved to be complex and differentiated - Language allows humans to make fine distinctions among emotions - Humans have both self-conscious emotions and moral emotions

Crosslinguistic Variations

• English: Egocentric preference ("left" and "right") • Tzeltal Mayan (spoken in Tenejapa, Mexico): Geocentric preference ("uphill", "downhill") - Lexical Gap: No projective left or right! - How do Tzeltal speakers tend to talk about space? - Frequently make statements that are the spatial equivalent of, "hand me the spoon that is to the northeast of the cup."

Implications for Interventions

• Environmental improvements may be expected not only to raise all children's ability, but to magnify individual differences - Taylor, Roehrig, Soden Hensler, Connor, & Schatschneider (2010) • Effective intervention studies - Good: Raise mean levels of ability - Bad: May magnify genetic differences

Appropriateness of services

• Ethnic minorities more likely to be misdiagnosed. - Behavior that is normal in some cultures may be seen as pathology if the evaluator doesn't understand the culture. • Ethnic minorities more likely to drop out of treatment, especially after the first session.

Culture & Psychopathology

• Even within "Western Civilization" the conception of and treatment of psychological disorder have changed drastically over time. • Making cultural comparisons on modern treatments may be short-sighted

What's going on here?

• Explicit linguistic effect? (People describe scenes to themselves, rate similarity based on descriptions) • People habitually attend more to the things that are encoded obligatorily in their language?

Deductive reasoning

• Few people actually engage in deductive reasoning in the real world - Judgments generally based on subjective probability, rather than deduction (e.g., Kahneman and Tversky, 1971) - Conjunction fallacy (Linda bank teller)

Controversy over intelligence

• Former Havard President Lawrence Summers • Suggested in 2005 that the under- representation of women in science and engineering could be due to a "different availability of aptitude at the high end," and less to patterns of discrimination and socialization." • Forced to resign (primarily) for this statement, lost opportunity to be Treasurer for Obama administration • suggestion that males tend to show more variation than women (probably not true)

Problems with fMRI research

• General problems with much classic fMRI research - Neuroscience of dead fish • Difficulties with cross-cultural studies - Scanner type and calibration settings matter - Generally requires all data to be gathered with a single scanner • Neuroscience is even WEIRDer - How well do studies translate to other populations - Spatial normalization - May ignore differences in human populations, distort some brains more than others

The future of research on genes and intelligence

• Genetic sequencing has become possible in the last few years, and is becoming inexpensive. • Several large scale studies of the genetic contributions to intelligence are currently underway. - Several research teams currently collecting data from thousands of Ph.D.s and Nobel Prize winners from all over the world, in order to analyze their genome and find the specific genes associated with intelligence. • What happens when we find out what genes correlate with higher intelligence/academic achievement? What are the consequences of knowing one's own "ability"? - Importance of understanding interplay between nature and nurture!

Genetic studies

• Genomics study of 126,000 people (Rietveld et al., 2013) - Identified three gene variants associated with years of schooling, university attendance. - Very small effects (each variant predicted roughly one additional month of schooling) • Genes generally associated with overall health - Other studies find genes associated with autism predict intelligence (Clarke, 2015)

Is very high intelligence even such good thing?

• Having extremely low OR high IQ predicts negative outcomes - Increased depression, anxiety - Psychopathic tendencies?

Basic Emotions

• Humans share a common base of emotion with their nonhuman primate relatives - Expressed universally in human faces - Brought on by same types of underlying psychological elicitors - Associated with unique physiological signatures in central and autonomic nervous systems - Based in evolutionary theory - Anger, disgust, fear, enjoyment, sadness, and surprise

Correlation between individualism-collectivism index and frequency of s-allele

• Implications for treatment of disorder - SSRI (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) • May be more effective for individuals with long version of allele - Recent studies suggest that SSRIs are less effective for East Asians (in Asia) vs. Euro-Americans and Asian Americans, even among individuals with the L allele for the serotonin transporter gene • Suggests a possible role of environment

Socio-economic status and intelligence

• Individuals from lower socio-economic classes generally score lower on intelligence tests - BUT, the ethnic or social group that scores lowest changes over time • When Irish and Italians were a discriminated "under-class" in the US they performed poorly - Middle class Black children in the North outscore poor white children in the South

The Story of Spider and Black Deer

• Intended as a measure of logical reasoning. • In the West, logical reasoning is supposed to be noncontextual, or acontextual. - ignore context - concentrate on the underlying logical problem. The story of Spider and Black Deer was devised to test syllogistic reasoning. - Kpelle subjects with Western-style schooling responded with syllogistic answer 90% of the time • Western-style syllogisms are very similar to certain forms of Kpelle riddles. - But Kpelle riddles have no single, "logically correct" answer.

Kay & Kempton, (1984): Comparative judgments among colors are affected by color naming practices

• Investigated English and Tarahumara • In Tarahumara there are no separate terms for blue and green • The task was see 3 chips pick the one least similar in color • Results: English speakers tended to pick the chip they would label 'blue' even though in the spectrum it was closer to the other colors • Support for a weak version of the Whorfian hypothesis

sleep paralysis cross-cultural

• Known to just about all cultures, and it is almost always associated with nocturnal evil. - Indonesia: digeunton ("pressed on"). - China: gui ya chuang ("held by a ghost"). - Japan: kanashibari ("bound with metal")

Barriers to Seeking Treatment

• Language barriers: - Language proficiency affects use of mental services • Stigma and mistrust: - Stigma associated with mental health services • Beliefs on health and illness: - Encouragement to rely on willpower to confront problems and be self-reliant • Social structures and policies: - Availability of mental health services, health insurance, and lack of culturally competent services

The debate rages on

• Li & Gleitman, Levinson, and others, continue to run similar tasks • Recent studies suggest that learning "left" and "right" correlates with a tremendous improvement in relative spatial reasoning for English speaking children

Low SES and intelligence

• Low SES as environmental stress (poor soil) - Obstacles to healthy development - Hard to reach full potential - Rich environments expose differences

Cross-Cultural Issues associated with anxiety disorders

• Material achievement anxiety is common in the West, but not in most other countries • Muslim women are reluctant to go to public places, but this is not agoraphobia • Fear of spirits is normal in some countries, but if extreme, then it may reflect a phobia • Repetitive praying is not OCD unless it interferes with social functioning • Similarity of symptoms does not accompany similarity of severity cross-culturally

Studies of emotional expression in Olympic athletes

• Matsumoto & Willingham, 2006 - Filmed Judo athletes competing in Athens Olympics (Over 35 countries) - Two time periods: - Match completion • Gold and Bronze medalists likely to show genuine happiness • Silver medalists showed sadness, anger, contempt - Podium ceremony • Genuine smiles in Gold and Bronze medalists • Other smiles observed in silver medalists

Innate Biological Variability

• Most adaptive gene variability across human populations has been associated with thermal regulation, pathogen resistance, and dietary practices. • Little is known about whether cultural differences in psychological variables are based in population difference in genes. - Once taboo, now becoming major research area

Heredity vs. Environment: Which is More Important?

• No other topic in psychology is so passionately followed as the one that asks the question, "Is intelligence due to genetics or environment?" - General agreement: Both are important. - Debate centers around the relative contribution of nature (heredity) and nurture (environment) to the development of intelligence. • Quickly becoming obsolete way of thinking...

Disparities in Receiving Treatment

• Not all people are equally likely to receive treatment - Between-country disparities: • Developing countries vs. industrialized countries • Availability of health services • Disparities for receiving treatment also exist within cultures. - Gender, age, class, ethnicity, etc.

Indigenous treatment

• Okinawan "Yuta" Shamans - World is occupied by supernatural beings called kami. Pleasing the kami through rituals avoids misfortune and encourages blessings. - Kaminchu do very little during rituals. They are analogous to and represent the kami, so they emit good spiritual energy. There presence is often requested at weddings, housewarmings, etc. - Yuta: the Shamans. These individuals mediate between the community and the supernatural. They practice divination and healing. The Yuta communicates with the kami while the kaminchu are supposed to be the kami. - woman diagnosed with schizophrenia became a shaman- incorporated into society instead of being ostracized for her condition

Cultural Influences on Visual Perception

• Optical illusions: perceptions involving apparent discrepancy between how an object looks and what it actually is • The Mueller-Lyer Illusion: >----< vs. <----> • Cross-cultural studies challenge traditional notions about optical illusion - Rivers (1905): Compared English, Indians and New Guineans • English more fooled by Mueller-Lyer illusion • Indians and New Guineans more fooled by horizontal-vertical illusion - Segall et al (1963, 1966): Compared industrialized vs. nonindustrialized groups • Same results as Rivers

Perception and Physical Reality

• Our perceptions of world do not necessarily match the physical realities of the world or of our senses - Blind spot - Change in perception of lukewarm water

Genetic influences across cultures/populations

• Population migration and the variation of dopamine D4 receptor (DRD4) allele frequencies around the globe (Chen et al., 1999) - L-allele more prevalent in migratory populations - Adaptive value to the l-allele - Relates to personality (e.g. novelty seeking, exploratory behaviour) • Area of Serotonin Transporter Gene (5-HTTLPR) - L allele - S allele: Increased negative emotion • e.g., harm avoidance, heightened anxiety, fear conditioning, attentional bias to negative information and increased risk of depression (Association between a functional serotonin transporter gene polymorphism and neuroticism)

Affordances in Japan and U.S.: Miyamoto, Nisbett, and Masuda, 2006

• Take pictures in US and Japanese cities - New York and Tokyo - Ann Arbor and Hikone - Two villages (Chelsea, Torahime) • Compare complexity of comparable scenes - e.g. in front of post office, school - Ratings of Complexity: number of objects, ambiguity of boundaries, degree to which parts of scene are invisible, orderliness vs. chaos - Japanese scenes more complex; more contextual references

Culture-Bound Syndromes

• Primarily emic approaches • Pattern of symptoms differ from Western classification schemes • Amok: observed culture-bound syndrome in Southeast Asia (sudden rage & homicidal aggression) - Stress, sleep deprivation & alcohol consumption trigger - Mostly males - "running Amok" • Witiko/windigo: Algonquin Indians & cannibalistic behavior • Koro: Fear of penis retraction and death. Observed in SE Asia, similar fear in China, African countries since 1996 • Ataque de nervious: Latin American groups: trembling, shouting, crying, dizziness: happens during stressful situations • Whakama: New Zealand Maori construct like shame, self abasement & feelings of inferiority, inadequacy, self-doubt, shyness, excessive modestly & withdrawal • Avanga: vivid, imaginary companionship w/ single external spirit - Originatied in Tongan culture; incidence on rise as people move toward cities • Zar: Ethiopian immigrants to Israel experiencing a possession by Zar spirits

Culture and Problem Solving

• Problem solving: process of discovering ways of achieving goals that are not readily attainable - Solving of two-step problems depended on context for Liberians • Problem solving with apparatus containing buttons, panels and slots - Liberians performed worse than Americans • When apparatus was constructed with familiar materials (lockbox and keys) Liberians performed just as well - Solving of syllogisms (deductive reasoning) related to culture and schooling (Scribner, 1979) (All children like candy. Mary is a child. Does Mary like candy?)

Problems with the measurement of intelligence and academic ability

• Problems with traditional measures: - Measures motivation as much as 'intelligence' - Cultural biases (Sternberg, 2004) - Intelligence as defined by success within one's cultural milieu using resources, making decisions, solving problems, with cultural tools at hand • Alternative to traditional IQ tests: Dynamic testing • Initial assessment provides a baseline of performance intervention • Second testing indicates what the individual has learned - Motivation?

Imposed etics

• Problems with treatment procedures - Focus on "feelings" and disclosure in individualist cultures - Trauma counseling: Taking about violent experiences linked to revenge violence in Rwanda • Some treatments can be harmful - Critical Incident Stress Debriefing and PTSD - Labelling effects in Croatian Veterans

Culturally appropriate programs

• Programs are culturally appropriate if they incorporate the values, beliefs, worldview, and behaviors of ethnic minorities into assessment and therapeutic activities. - E.g., cuento therapy for Puerto Rican children - Ethnotherapy

The Nasty History of Intelligence Research

• Racism and Sexism - Early prominent European scientists believed in fundamental differences between the races, with the "Western European species" at the top. - Many attempted to use intelligence tests to bar entry to certain ethnic groups from entry in the US (Southern Europeans in particular). - Differences in intelligence found between ethnic groups have been used support policies based on eugenics, the holocaust, etc.

Li and Gleitman (2002): this can't be!

• Rats and pre-linguistic children both show signs of using both egocentric and geocentric reasoning - Can't be a matter of language teaching these reasoning skills • Studies test speakers' preferences in encoding spatial arrays, rather than comparing their ability to solve spatial tasks which require different frames of reference. - Tseltal speakers are quite capable of thinking about left and right, even though they do not use these distinctions if other options are available - English speaking adults use geocentric terms all the time (e.g., uptown/downtown), so if language does have an effect, it should have an effect on them, too!

Winawer, Boroditsky and others (2007): English and Russian divide up blues differently

• Russian makes an obligatory distinction between lighter blues ("goluboy") and darker blues ("siniy"). • Results: Russian speakers faster to discriminate two colors when they fell into different linguistic categories (one siniy and the other goluboy) than when they were from the same linguistic category (both siniy or both goluboy). • English speakers tested on the identical stimuli did not show a category advantage in any of the conditions. • Support for a weak version of the Whorfian hypothesis: categories in language affect performance on simple perceptual color tasks

Hudson (1960): Pictorial perception and culture

• Showed picture of man spearing an elephant or gazelle (based on depth perception) to people from a small- scale society in Africa (Bantu) • When asked "what is the man doing" participants could not say which animal was 'being speared' - Did not seem to use depth cues • Classified as "two dimensional viewers"

Universal color cognition

• Similarity ratings across colors didn't seem to vary for speakers of different languages. • Color perception seemed determined by biology, not language. • Linguistic relativism - Myth busted!

Cross-cultural variation in heritability of intelligence

• Social welfare vs. non-social welfare countries - High Social Welfare: Australia, Sweden - Low Social Welfare: USA • Smaller genetic effects in USA - Larger impact of environment and SES - Greater differences in schools for high and low SES students • Even students with high potential for academic achievement do not learn when they are in bad schools... IQ based more on genetic factors in high SES (good soil)

Pathology in Christian Counseling

• Some psychological problems are more clearly "diseases" than others - part of life in a fallen world • Many are the results of sin, or the fallout of the sins of others - In this view, not necessarily pathology • DSM-V is useful, but may - Pathologize or normalize sin - Miss problems Christians encounter

Defining Abnormality

• Statistical prevalence? • Problems with approach - Not all rare behavior is abnormal • Is the individual's behavior associated with impairment or inefficiency? - Abnormal because of "social norms" - Problematic to rely on reports of subjective distress - Must apply cultural context to abnormality

If different cultures use different rules to construct their pictures, can people interpret the drawings of another culture?

• Studied children (boys) from the Me'en tribe of Ethiopia • Ethiopian children prefer the split style of drawing (animal laying on belly with legs splayed outward; globe laid flat)

Concerns About Diagnostic System

• The danger of overdiagnosis. • The power of diagnostic labels. • Confusion of serious mental disorders with normal problems. • The illusion of objectivity. • Cultural Specificity

Counting & Arithmetic

• The greater regularity of number names in Chinese, Japanese and Korean as compared to English or French facilitates the learning of counting behavior beyond 10 in those languages. • Another advantage is earlier mastery of 'place value' (understanding that in # 23 there are 2 tens and 3 ones) - Korean children performed best on place value problems

Deregowski (1972): Pictorial perception and culture

• The key to understanding pictures lies in depth cues • We learn three rules related to depth cues in visual objects: - larger objects are perceived as nearer - Overlap-obscured objects seen as further away - perspective: lines converge as they get further away (railway lines)

Conclusion on Cultural Differences

• There are universal and culture-specific aspects of human emotions • Basic emotions are universal • Subjective experience and emotion language may be culture-specific

Cuento Therapy

• Treatment for Hispanic adolescents that utilizes culturally relevant folktales to address issues related to educational and psychological difficulties. - Thought to increase treatment engagement, tconvey cultural beliefs, values and behaviors, model functional relationships. - After cuentos are read aloud, children react to them and discuss the meaning and personal relevance. - Cuento therapy is associated with reduced anxiety, greater levels of self-esteem, reading performance

Help-seeking behavior

• US ethnic minorities less likely to seek out professional mental health treatment. - E.g., European Americans are 1.5 times more likely voluntarily to seek mental health care than are African Americans. • Stigma against seeking help in Latinx and Asian groups - Stigma, suspiciousness, lack of awareness of services • Belief that dwelling on thoughts can make the problem worse - More common among East Asian individuals • Fear of appearing weak - "Toughing it out" in African-American cultures - Cultures of honor, masculinity

Problematic issues

• Understanding of mental illness - Biological dysfunction? If so, why bother with cultural relevance? • How do you adapt mental health services to diverse cultural groups? - Problem of stereotypes - "my client is Asian, so I expect him/her to be like all other Asians.."

Cross-Cultural Research on Psychopathology

• Universal and culture-specific elements • Contributes to our understanding of interplay between individual differences (i.e., genes) and environment

Culture and Memory

• Universal: Memory decrease with age and hindsight bias • Cultural differences: memory as a function of oral tradition for meaningful material and serial position effect - Ghanaians have better recall of stories read out loud - consequence of oral tradition (Ross and Millson, 1970) - Serial position effect (recency and primacy) - Primacy effect more common in educated populations

Culture and Categorization

• Universal: Process of categorization - Universal categories: facial expressions, colors, stereotypes, and shapes • Cultural differences: the way in which people categorize things - Western adults categorize by function whereas African adults categorize by color - American children categorize by shared function whereas Chinese children categorize by shared contextual relationships • Western cultures sort hierarchically - Intelligent sorting: fish- animal - Less intelligent sorting: fish- eat • Kpelle tribe in Africa (Liberia) sorted functionally • What would a stupid person do? Sort like Americans

Cultural Neuroscience

• Using methods of neuroscience to understand cultural variation in psychology and behavior - fMRI, EEG, hormones, genetic variants, gene expression, epigenetics • Studies how culture shapes and is shaped by the mind/brain - Anthropology, Psychology, Neuroscience, Genetics, social neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience, Affective Neuroscience, Neuroanthropology

Other SNPs to consider: MTHFR mutation

• When you eat foods that contain folic acid (vitamin B9), MTHFR converts it into methyl- folate, folate's active form.

Culture-Specific Understanding of Intelligence

• Which types of intelligence are valued? - Cultural and historical context often emphasize one form of intelligence over others - Cultural assumptions influence concept of intelligence - Intelligence tests and school curriculums reflect assumptions about the construct being measured • E.g., analytic vs. holistic cognition

Deregowski (1972): Pictorial perception and culture study 2

• Zambian children - shown picture of two squares connected by a 'rod' • Given sticks and modelling clay to 'build a model' of what they saw • 2-D viewers built two dimensional models • British primary school children usually try to build 3 dimensional models (boxes)