Cross-Cultural Psychology Exam 3

Primary control

changing existing realities to fit one's own perceptions, goals, or desires •Internal locus of control, influence, agency •More common in Western contexts

Findings of the study conducted by Oishi (2002) in which European American and Asian American participants were asked to report their satisfaction every day for a week and asked them to recall how satisfying the week was after it was over.

pg.408-410

Theories of an ideal life

pg.408-410

European Americans recall their past experiences as more satisfying than do Asian Americans (understand why this cultural differences occur)

short answer: European focus more on their successes rather than failures and tend to remember it more compared to Asian Americans

James-Lange theory of emotion

theory maintains that our body responds to environmental stimuli by preparing us to react in order for survival ( such as running away from the bear), and our emotions are the bodily cues that signal how we should behave. (pg. 384)

How can the basic emotions best be characterized?

Happiness, Surprise, Sadness, Anger, disgust, and Fear;

What does the research evidence show that stronger self-enhancement motivations are associated with?

Reveals the people apparently have a strong need to view themselves positively (pg. 296) In addition, Evidence of this motivation is evident from responses to measures of self-esteem.

Subjective well-being across cultures

The feeling of how satisfied one is with one's life. (Pg.406-408)

Self-serving bias (be able to apply this concept when provided with an example)

The tendency for people to exaggerate one's positive characteristics. (pg.296)

Cultural differences in attention and artistic preferences among South Korean

-One thing he observed is that horizons in landscape scenes were painted considerably higher (about 15% on average) in East Asian pictures than western ones.--A higher horizon calls attention to the depth of the setting and allows for all the different objects and places within a scene to be seen in relation to each other, whereas a lower horizonreduces the range of the scene that is visible--East Asian paintings thus naturally direct the eye to the relations among the different objects and places within a scene, whereas western paintings tend to direct and audience's attention to particular focal objects -Second, he saw that figures in portraits were much larger in Western pictures than in east asian ones (on average, western faces were 3x larger). The larger faces serve to focus one's attention on the portrayed individual -Argue the differences in art styles reflect some fundamental differences in basic cognitive and perceptual processes between the two cultures -Study: asked American and Japanese students to draw a picture with a house, a tree, a river, a person, and a horizon in under 5 minutes--East Asian drew a horizon that was signficantly higher in the picture than it was for the Americans, and they tended to draw more complex backgrounds --Think this is because they live in a busier physical environment which gives them the ability to attend to a lot of information at once

Biases of self-enhancers

-the tendency to evaluate the self more positively than others -research reveals strong variation in the strength of this motivation across cultures. - research finds that east asians evince far less motivation for self-enhancement than do westerners Western biases in research methods prevent us from seeing East Asian motivation to self-enhance, and perhaps East Asians enhance their group instead. •East Asians would self-enhance on different traits that they find more important. •Modesty norms prevent East Asians from reporting self-enhancement

Two-factor theory of emotion

A theory that maintains that emotions are primarily our interpretations of physiological responses to stimuli.

Cultural differences in attentional style

Analytic thinkers attend to separate, specific parts of a scene, while holistic thinkers attend more broadly, across an entire scene

Understand how analytic thinking differs from holistic thinking

Analytic thinking •Focus on objects and attributes •Objects perceived as independent from contexts •Taxonomic categorization Holistic thinking •Attending to context and the relations among objects •Predicting an object's behavior on the basis of those relationships •Thematic categorization

Responding to rules in a collectivistic culture

Collectivistic cultures base life satisfaction on living up to others standards for being a good person.

Ritualized display

Facial expressions that are expressed in some cultures but not in others as a function of cultural display rules.

What kind of thinker perceives the world as an integrated whole?

Holistic Thinker

Cross-cultural research on odor perception

In this study, Americans reached more agreement among themselves when describing colors than when describing odors. There was almost no agreement among American participants in how they described odors. In contrast, the Jahai reached about the same amount of agreement when describing colors as when they were describing odors. (pg. 366)

Understand the motivations for self-enhancement and self-esteem

Self-enhancement is the motivation to view oneself positively (pg. 296) and self-esteem is the positivity of your overall evaluation of yourself.

Association between analytic thinking and dispositional attributions

Trying to understand people's behavior by considering their inner characteristics (such as their personality traits) is an example of analytic thinking. In contrast, explaining people's behavior by considering how the situation is influencing them is an example of holistic ways of thinking, we would expect westerns to be more apt to make dispositional attributions, explaining behavior interns of a persons underlying qualities.

Kim and Markus's (1999) research on advertisements in Korea and the United States

Uniqueness messages were more common in American ads, and conformity messages were more common in Korean ads (pg. 329)

Secondary Control

aligning oneself with the existing realities by controlling their psychological impact •External locus of control, adjustment, acceptance •More common in non-Western contexts

Situational attribution

explaining behavior in terms of contextual factors •Example of holistic thinking •More common among East Asian

The association between low-context culture and explicit communication

low-context culture is less involvement among individuals, and therefore less shared information to guide behavior. As a result, people have to communicate in more explicit detail, as others are less able to fill in the gaps of what is not said.

Fundamental attribution error

tendency to ignore situational information while focusing on dispositional information Example : Castro essay study (Jones & Harris, 1967) •American students asked to evaluate an essay writer's true attitudes by reading an essay espousing either a positive or critical stance toward Fidel Castro. •Two conditions: Free choice and assigned stance •Participants assumed the essay reflected the writer's true attitudes, regardless of condition