Several years back a group of eager teens from Canada met other groups from the US to spend several weeks working at a Christian camp in Belize. The young people slept in hammocks, ran for their water, fought bugs and vermin, influenced young lives, and generally had a profitable time. Upon returning to Florida, the group hosting the trip planned an entire day at Disneyworld. This was not done as a reward for their work, but as a means to help them readjust to their home culture. The shock of being in the unreal world of Disneyworld was designed to acclimate them to the next day as they returned to what used to be the familiar. In spite of this, the adjustment for some was traumatic. One girl spent three days alone in her room, unable to cope with the striking contrast between life in Belize and that in the north. Part of the difficulty in this cultural adjustment was due to the fact that she had so little experience doing it.
American Heritage Dictionary defines culture as “The totality of socially transmitted behavior patterns, arts, beliefs, institutions, and all other products of human work and thought.” (That is of course only one of a dozen meanings of the word.) Thus, culture entails all that makes a country or group of people unique.
Related posts
Does psychology as an import from Western culture adequately explain Eastern behavior? Are all human brains and thus, development, cognition, and behavioral patterns essentially alike? Are its methods of therapy appropriate or displaced? Are the goals for outcome similar regardless of geography, or must they be modified to reflect the values of the dominant culture? And perhaps most of all: is the overlay of a Western model of the mind effecting change on the cultural psyche of the East?
Psychology as a scientific study has the pathology-driven Western medical model at its foundation, overlaid by the values of ancient Greece, such as individuation, self-control, and self-efficacy. The cultures of Asia have at their core the values of ancient China, such as hierarchy, moral development, achievement, and social responsibility, and a non-dualistic medical system that is based on principles of balance and harmony. Some, such as Richard Nisbett in The Geography of Thought,argue that these phenomenally diverse core systems result in very different processes of cognition. In the West, cognitive process is one of logic, critical analysis, and direct, rational thought, in which the universe is conceptualized as the sum of its parts which can further be categorized, and is generally termed Analytic Cognition. In the East, cognition is abstract, paradoxical, circular and indirect, the universe a web of infinite connections; this is known as Holistic Cognition. If cognition and constructs of illness are phenomenally different, how can the same model for human behavior and development adequately apply to both?
Related posts
There are several common problems encountered when culturing cells. Problems in primary cell cultures may have different causes than the same problem in established cell lines. The examples below address some of the common problems encountered when doing cell culture along with their possible causes and suggested actions to resolve them.
Problem: Rapid pH shift in medium
Related posts
