INTERESTING CULTURAL PSYCHOLOGY DEFINITIONS
A
Acculturation – The process by which people migrate to and learn a culture that is different from their original (or heritage) culture [M]
Affective commitment – The level of personal feelings associated with one’s relationships to an organization [M]
Agonias – An anxiety disorder that can include a wide array of symptoms such as a burning sensation, a loss of breath, hysterical blindness, sleeping disorders, and eating disorders [H]
Amok – A phenomenon found in Southeast Asia whereby an individual has an acute outburst of indiscriminate violence followed by amnesia and exhaustion [H]
Animism – The belief that all things, including inanimate objects, are alive [M]
Appraisal – The process by which people evaluate the events, situations, or occurrences that lead to their having emotions [M]
Ataques de nervios – A condition in which emotionally charged incidents bring on symptoms such as palpitations, numbness, and a sense of heat rising to the head [H]
B
Better than average effect – The tendency for individuals to underestimate the commonality of desirable traits and to overestimate their uniqueness [M]
C
Calling – In religious belief, the God-given purpose an individual is meant to fulfill during their life [H]
Centration – The tendency to focus on a single aspect of a problem [M]
Cognitive Dissonance – The distressing feeling that accompanies the awareness that one is acting inconsistently [H]
Collective identity – A form of identity that refers to our recognition that we belong to social categories, such as occupation, religion, or culture [M]
Compliance – Yielding to social pressure in one’s public behavior, even though one’s private beliefs may have not changed [M]
Conceptual bias – The degree to which a theory or set of hypotheses being compared across cultures are equivalent – that is, where they have the same meaning and relevance in all the cultures being compared [M]
Contact hypothesis – The proposition that contact between groups is especially effective in reducing prejudice [M]
Contemporary Legends – Fictional stories told in modern societies as though they are true [H]
Cultural attribution fallacies – A mistaken interpretation in cross-cultural comparison studies. Cultural attribution fallacies occur when researchers infer that something cultural produced the differences that they observed in their study despite the fact that they may not be empirically justified in doing so because they did not actually measure those cultural factors [M]
Cultural concepts of distress – The shared ways in which cultural groups or communities experience, express, and interpret distress [M]
Cultural display rules – Culturally prescribed rules that govern how universal emotions can be expressed. These rules center on the appropriateness of displaying emotion, depending on the social circumstance [M]
Cultural explanations of distress – What communities and cultural groups believe is the cause of the distress, symptoms, or illness [M]
Cultural fit hypothesis – The proposition that immigrants and sojourners with characteristics that match their host cultures will adjust better than those with less match [M]
Cultural identity – This refers to individuals’ psychological membership in a distinct culture [M]
Cultural idioms of distress – Ways that communities and cultural groups communicate and express their distressing thoughts, feelings and emotions [M]
Cultural neuroscience – An emerging research field that combines recent advances in neuroscience with principles of cultural psychology and population genetics to understand the dynamic relations between culture, behavior, mind, brain, and genes [M]
Culture-bound syndromes – Groups of symptoms that appear to be greatly influenced by cultural factors, and hence occur far less frequently in some cultures than others, or manifest in highly divergent ways across cultures [H]
D
Decoding rules – Culturally dependent rules that govern the interrelation and perception of emotion [M]
Dhat syndrome – A culture-bound syndrome, most common in South Asia, in which men develop morbid anxiety around concerns they are losing semen [H]
Display rules – The culturally specific rules that govern which facial expressions are appropriate in given situation and how intensely they should be exhibited [H]
Distributive justice – Fairness regarding the distribution of resources, such as pay, the corner office, or perks [H]
E
Ecological (cultural) level studies – A study in which countries or cultures, not individuals, are the unit of analysis [M]
Emblems – Nonverbal gestures that carry meaning, lake a phrase or a sentence [M]
Emics – Aspects of life that appear to differ across cultures; truths or principles that are culture-specific [M]
Emotion antecedents – The events or situations that elicit or trigger an emotion [M]
Emotion response system coherence – The idea that various response components of an emotion – facial expressions, voice, physiological reactions, movements, etc – are related to each other in a coordinated fashion that prepares individuals to do something vis-à-vis the emotion aroused [M]
Emotional complexity – The idea that positive and negative emotions can co-occur and be experienced simultaneously [M]
Emotions – Transient, neurophysicological reactions to events that have consequences for our welfare, and require an immediate behavioral response. They include feelings, but also physiological reactions, expressive behaviors, behavioral intentions, and cognitive changes [M]
Encephalization quotient – The ratio of an animal’s brain weight predicted for a comparable animal of the same body size [H]
Enculturation – the process by which individuals learn and adopt the ways and manners of their specific culture [M]
Endowment effect – The tendency for owners and potential sellers of goods or products to value those products more than potential buyers do [M]
Epidemiological paradox – The surprisingly healthy outcomes of Latinx despite their having lower-than-average socioeconomic status [H]
Episodic memory – The recollection of specific events that took place at a particular time and place in the past [M]
Equivalence – A state or condition of similarity in conceptual meaning and empirical method between cultures that allows comparisons to be meaningful [M]
Essentialized gender – A gender identity that is believed to reflect an underlying and unchanging nature [H]
Ethnic identity – Individuals’ psychological membership in a distinct ethnic group [M]
Ethnocentrism – The tendency to judge people from other cultures by comparing them to the standards of one’s own culture [M]
Etics – Aspects of life that appear to be consistent across different cultures; universal or pancultural truths or principles [M]
Explicit prejudice- Prejudice that is verbalized and thus made public [M]
Extreme response bias – The tendency to use the ends of the scale regardless of item content [M]
F
Face – The amount of social value others give an individual if they live up to the standards associated with their position; the public appearance or image of a person [H/M]
Female chastity anxiety – The anxiety that unmarried post-pubescent women are vulnerable to shameful sexual activity [H]
Foreign language effect – A temporary decline in the thinking ability of people who are using a foreign language in which they are less proficient than their native tongue. [M]
French paradox – The fact that despite eating a cuisine that’s rich in fat, French people have low obesity rates and relatively long lifespans [H]
Frigophobia – A morbid fear of catching a cold, which leads people to dress themselves in heavy coats and scarves even in summer [H]
Fundamental attribution error – A tendency to explain the behaviors of others using internal attributions but to explain one’s own behaviors using external attributions [M]
G
Gender stratification hypothesis – The idea that gender differences are related to cultural variations in opportunity structures for girls and women [M]
General psychology – Richard Shweder’s term for the overarching perspective of the field of psychology of assuming that the mind operates under a set of natural and universal laws that exist independently of the context that the individual is in and of the content of what they are thinking about. [H]
Group entitativity – The belief that groups are like people in that they have intentions and the ability to plan actions [M]
Groupthink – A collective pattern of thinking that hinders effective group decisions [M]
H
Haptics – The use of touch in interpersonal interactions [H]
Health disparities – Differences in health outcomes by groups [M]
Heritage culture – The culture identified as a person’s culture of origins [H]
High-context cultures – Cultures that promote communication in which many messages are conveyed indirectly in context rather than directly in verbal language [M]
Hikikomori – A culture-bound syndrome, largely limited to Japan, in which people, most often adolescent boys, impose a self-incarceration and withdraw from all social interaction for an extended period of time [H]
Hindsight bias – The process by which individuals adjust their memory for something after they found out the true outcome [M]
I
Ideal affect – The kinds of emotions that people want to experience, and thus they structure their lives in order to increase their experience of them [H]
Immigrants – People who move to a new culture and intend to stay permanently [H]
Infrahumanization – The belief that others lack human qualities [M]
Ingroup advantage – The hypothesis that individuals can recognize emotions expressed by members of thei own culture relatively better than those from a different culture [M]
Institutional discrimination – Discrimination that occurs on the level of a large group, society, organization, or institution [M]
Integrative complexity – A willingness and ability to acknowledge and consider different viewpoints on the same issue [H]
K
Koro – A culture-bound syndrome, largely found in South and East Asia, in which men become morbidly anxious that their penis is retracting to their body [H]
L
Latah – A condition in which an individual falls into a transient dissociated state in which they exhibit unusual behavior after some kind of startling event [H]
Learned helplessness – The feeling of being unable to control or avoid unpleasant events, which cause stress and potentially depression [H]
Lexicon – The words contained in a language, the vocabulary [M]
Low-context cultures – Cultures that promote direct communication in which messages are conveyed primarily and directly in verbal language and the effects of context are minimized [M]
M
Machismo – A concept related to Mexican American gender role differentiation that is characterized by many traditional expectations of the male gender role, such as being unemotional, strong, authoritative, and aggressive [M]
Malgri – A syndrome of territorial anxiety in which and individual grows phsycially sick, tired, and drowsy when entering the sea or a new territory without engaging I the appropriate ceremonial procedures [H]
Mate poaching – Attracting someone who is already in a romantic relationship with someone else [M]
Mere exposure effect – An effect which states that the more people are exposed to a stimulus the more they are attracted to it [H]
Migrants – People who move from a heritage culture (their original culture) to a host culture (their new culture), including those who intend to stay temporarily and those who intend to move permanently [H]
Minimally counterintuitive ideas – Ideas that violate our expectation enough to be considered surprising and unusual, but not too outlandish [H]
N
National character – the perception that each culture has a modal personality type, and that most persons in that culture share aspects of it [M]
Neocortex ratio – The ratio of the volume of the neocortex to the volume of the rest of the brain, which is used as a proxy measure of intelligence [H]
Nemawashi – The broad-based consensus-building procedure that occurs within the Japanese ringi system of decision making [H]
Normative commitment – The degree to which one’s ties to the organization are bound by duty and obligation [M]
Norm – A generally accepted standard of behavior witin a culture of sub-cultural group [M]
Nuerasthenia – A psychiatric condition characterized as a nervous syndrome consisting of over 50 symptoms, including poor appetite, headaches, insomnia, weakness in the back, hysteria, and an inability to concentrate [H]
O
Occam’s razor – The principle that any theory should make as few assumptions as possible; it maintains that, all else held equal, the simpler theory is more likely to be correct [H]
Orthodox – A term describing religious adherents committed to he tidea of a transcendent authority that operates independently of people and is more knowledgeable and powerful than all of human experience]
Overpathologizing – misinterpreting culturally sanctioned behavior as expressions of pathological symptoms [M]
P
Paralinguistic cues – Aspects of the voice that convey information, such as tone, intonation, pitch, speech rate, use of silence [M]
Pragmatics – The system of rules governing how language is used and understood in given social contexts [M]
Procedural justice – Fairness associated with the procedures and processes that organizations use to make decisions [M]
Progressive – A term describing religious adherents who emphasize the importance of human agency in understanding and formulating a moral code [H]
Propinquity effect – An effect which states that people are more likely to befriend people they interact with frequently [H]
Proxemics – The use of space in interpersonal relationships [M]
Psychological contracts – The perceptions of mutual obligation that exist between organizations and their members, which differ across cultures [M]
Psychologization – When symptoms of an illness are primarily experienced psychologically rather than physically [H]
R
Racial identity – Individual’s psychological membership in a distinct racial group [M]
Racial microaggressions – Brief and commonplace indignities that communicate negative slights and insults [M]
Ratchet effect – The concept that humans continually improve on improvements, that they do not go backward or revert to a previous state [M]
Religion – Organized systems of beliefs that tie together many attitudes, values, beliefs, worldview’s, and norms [M]
Reverse culture shock – The culture shock that individuals experience upon returning to their home cultures and realizing that things are not the same as when they left [M]
Ritualized displays – Facial expressions that are expressed in some cultures but not in others as a function of cultural display rules [H]
S
Sacred values – Values considered to be nonnegotiable. Such values outweigh other values [M]
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis – The proposition that speakers of different languages think differently, and that they do so because of the differences in their languages. [M]
Secondary control – The control experienced when people attempt to align themselves with existing realities, leaving their circumstances unchanged but exerting control over the circumstance’s psychological impact. [H]
Self-enhancement – The motivation to view oneself positively [M]
Self-serving bias – A tendency for people to view themselves in unrealistically positive terms; a bias in which people tend to attribute good deeds and successes to their own internal attributes but attribute bad deeds or failures to external factors [M]
Semantics – What words mean [M]
Shared intentionality – Knowledge about motivations concerning behaviors that are common among people in a group [M]
Signals – The specific words and behaviors that are sent during communication that convey messages [M]
Similarity-attraction effect – An effect when states that people tend to be attracted to those who are most like themselves [H]
Simpatico – A relational style common in many Latin-American cultures in which people emphasize maintaining harmonious relationships and making expressive displays of graciousness, hospitality, and personal harmony [H]
Social anxiety disorder – A fear that one is in danger of acting in an inept and unacceptable manner, and that such behavior will bring disastrous social consequences [H]
Social axioms – generals beliefs and premises about oneself, the social and physical environment, and the spiritual world [M]
Social brain hypothesis – The theory that cognitive demands inherent in social living led to the evolution of large primate brains [H]
Social capital – The social resources available to a person that can be used to obtain one’s goals [M]
Social loafing – The common finding in research on group productivity in the US that individual productivity tends to decline in larger groups [M]
Social striving – The finding in many cultures that working in a group enhances individual performance rather than diminishes it [M]
Socialization – The process by which we learned and internalize the rules and patterns of behavior that are affected by culture [M]
Sojourners – People who move to a new culture and intend to stay there only temporarily [H]
Somatization – When symptoms of an illness are primarily experienced physically rather than psychologically [H]
Stereotypes – Generalized images we have about groups of people, particularly about their underlying psychological characteristics and traits [M]
Subjective self-awareness – A state of mind in which individuals consider themselves from the perspective of the subject and demonstrate little awareness of themselves asw individuals [H]
T
Tactical self-enhancement – The idea that people of different cultures all self-enhance, but they choose to do it in different ways (tactical) [M]
Taijin kyoufushou (TKU) A disorder similar to social anxiety disorder in that it involves fear elicited by social situations, but it is also characterized by psychical symptoms, including extensive blushing, body odor, sweating, and a penetrating gaze [H]
Terror management theory – The theory that suggests that, because humans have unique cognitive abilities, they are the only animals that are aware of the fact that we will die eventually, and we are afraid, terrified in fact, of that inevitable death Because inevitable death is terrifying to us, we create psychological phenomena as a buffer against the terror of dying [M]
Theory of mind – A human ability to understand that others have minds that are different from one’s own, and thus that other people have their own distinct perspectives and intentions [H]
Tightness versus looseness – A dimension of cultural variability that refers to the variability within a culture of its members to norms. Tight cultures have less variability and are more homogenous with respect to norms; loos cultures have more variability and are more heterogeneous [M]
Trait – A characteristic or quality distinguishing a person. It refers to a consistent pattern of behavior that a person would usually display in relevant circumstances [M]
Two-factor theory of emotions – A theory that maintains that emotions are primarily our interpretation of physiological responses to stimuli [H]
U
Uncertainty reduction – One of the major goals of initial intercultural encounters – to reduce the level of uncertainly and anxiety that one feels when attempting to decode intercultural messages [M]
Underpathologizing – Attributing pathological symptoms to normative cultural differences [M]
Universal – A psychological process that is found to be true or applicable for all people of all cultures [M]
Universal psychological toolkit – a set of basic psychological skills and abilities that poepe can use to meet their needs. These include complex cognitive skills, language, emotions, and personality traits [M]
Unpacking – Identifying the underlying variables that give rise to different cultural differences
Unpackaging studies – studies that unpackage the contents of the global, unspecific concept of culture into specific, measurable psychological constructs and examine their contributions to cultural differences [M]
V
Values – trans-situational goals that serves as a guiding principle in the life of a person or group. Values motivate and justify behavior and serve as standards for judging people, actions, and events [M]
Voodoo death – A condition in which an individual is convinced that they have been cursed or have broken a taboo, which results in a server level of fear that sometimes leads to death [H]
W
WEIRD – Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic societies – a shorthand for the kinds of societies that the psychological database is largely based on [H]
Whorfian hypothesis – The words that are available to people influence/determine how they think [H]
[H] = Heine, S. J. (2016). Cultural psychology (3rd ed.). New York, NY: Norton
[M] = Matsumoto, D. and Juang, L. (2017). Culture and Psychology. 6th edition. Cengage