Culture-specific Ways Research Articles

Attachment theory across cultures: An examination of cross-cultural perspectives and alloparenting practices (Mini-Review)

Attachment theory initially put forth by Bowlby is a basis for comprehending the emergence and importance of emotional bonds between infants and their caretakers. However, contemporary studies have increasingly highlighted the necessity for accounting for cultural contexts in attachment dynamics. This paper aims at investigating all aspects of attachment theory using a cross-cultural perspective to find out how cultural norms and customs influence relationships of attachment. In particular, it is based on an explanation of the concept of alloparenting which implies that caregiving duties are distributed among more than one member in a community. The author compares Western and non-Western child-rearing practices including examples from such societies as Aka foragers located in Africa or Beng people in West Africa among others thereby revealing the wide range of different kinds of relationships formed as attachments by humans. Furthermore, it also probes how this affects child development, family structures, and societal values regarding culture-specific ways that children attach to primary caregivers through understanding themselves as culturally specific and thus not universal. By synthesizing experiential research and speculative platforms, this paper enhances our comprehension of attachment theory in terms of cultural diversity, stressing the significance of including cultural viewpoints in developmental psychology research as well as its everyday use.

Communicating Meaning across High- and Low- Context Cultures – a Comparative Analysis

Communication involves a host of factors, being embedded in the broad socio-cultural context in which messages are conveyed. Several theoretical frameworks have been proposed concerning patterns of communication and the way(s) they differ according to culture. Our paper draws on Hall’s (1976) key notions of low-context and high-context cultures, coupled with strategies of explicitation and implicitation. Our analysis focuses on the extent to which communicators rely on “context” to overtly state something in low-context cultures, or to covertly render a message in high-context cultures. Accordingly, we aim to highlight that culture-specific ways of communication are typically reflected in the use of phrases and/or idiomatic expressions that count as allusions (historical, literary, etc.) or opaque culture-specific items.

Displays of anger in Turkish political discourse: a hard choice between cultural norms and political performance of anger

Abstract This paper examines the influence of cultural display rules on how high-status individuals, such as political leaders, publicly express anger. Specifically, it focuses on Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who has been the Turkish leader since 2003. The study aims to understand the extent to which Erdoğan’s expression of anger is influenced by cultural display rules, the religious context stemming from his conservative electoral support, and his position as a long-term populist political leader. Using extended conceptual metaphor theory (ECMT) supported by corpus-assisted discourse analysis, the paper seeks to identify the contextual factors that shape anger expressions (both direct and metaphorical) in the political discourse of a populist leader in a collectivist culture. By comparing the conceptualization of ascribed anger and inscribed anger expressions, the analysis reveals that Erdoğan’s discourse presents two distinct scenarios for expressing anger toward ‘us’ and ‘others’. Additionally, it demonstrates how anger is strategically employed in culture-specific ways to navigate the challenges posed by conflicting contextual factors.

Longitudinal links between maternal directives, children's engagement in family conversations, and child linguistic skills.

Research on mother-child verbal interaction is largely inspired by Vygotsky. The results align with his view that children acquire language and culture-specific ways of using language through actively participating in daily conversations with adults. Supporting Vygotsky's concept of the Zone of Proximal Development, the facilitative features of such conversations have been found to depend on age, the level of the child's language skills, and the interactional context. Most previous studies in the field have been conducted in English-speaking Western families with a focus on the first years of children's lives. As Estonian middle-class mothers have been found to put greater emphasis on controlling children than mothers from other cultural contexts, we included the frequency of using directives as one of the features of mothers' speech that might have an impact on child language development. Accordingly, the current study explored the relative impact of various aspects of mother-child interaction (e.g., mothers' vocabulary diversity, use of attentional and behavioral directives, wh-questions, and the amount of children's talk) on children's language skills using data collected from Estonian middle-class families at two timepoints, 1 year apart. As a novel approach to this topic, the study also examined the correlation between mothers' input features and children's participation in the parent-child conversation. A total of 87 children aged 3;0 and 4;0 and their mothers participated in the study. We observed the mother-child interactions during a semistructured videotaped game played at home. Mothers reported their children's language skills via the ECDI-III. Children's language comprehension and production were measured using the examiner-administered NRDLS. Although the results showed somewhat differential effects of various aspects of mothers' speech on different measures of child language skills at two timepoints, the diversity of mothers' speech was positively, and mothers' frequent use of directives negatively related to children's language skills. At both ages, the diversity of mothers' speech predicted the amount of children's verbal contribution to conversations. The findings will be discussed in light of Vygotskian and his followers' theoretical views and theories about child language development.

Proximal and distal honor fit and subjective well-being in the Mediterranean region.

People's psychological tendencies are attuned to their sociocultural context and culture-specific ways of being, feeling, and thinking are believed to assist individuals in successfully navigating their environment. Supporting this idea, a stronger "fit" with one's cultural environment has often been linked to positive psychological outcomes. The current research expands the cultural, conceptual, and methodological space of cultural fit research by exploring the link between well-being and honor, a central driver of social behavior in the Mediterranean region. Drawing on a multi-national sample from eight countries circum-Mediterranean (N=2257), we examined the relationship between cultural fit in honor and well-being at the distal level (fit with one's perceived society) using response surface analysis (RSA) and at the proximal level (fit with one's university gender group) using profile analysis. We found positive links between fit and well-being in both distal (for some, but not all, honor facets) and proximal fit analyses (across all honor facets). Furthermore, most fit effects in the RSA were complemented with positive level effects of the predictors, with higher average honor levels predicting higher well-being. Our findings highlight the interplay between individual and environmental factors in honor as well as the important role honor plays in well-being in the Mediterranean region.

CULTURAL COMPETENCE, A CONDITION FOR SECOND-LANGUAGE PROFICIENCY

The present paper, based on the author’s experience of teaching English to students of economics, sets out to verify the conclusions reached by linguistic anthropologists over the last decades about the relationship between linguistic and cultural competence. It identifies the main cultural characteristics of the UK and the US, as well as their various linguistic consequences, in an attempt to demonstrate that developing the four traditional language skills is not quite enough for effective intercultural communication in English, and that the one element that should be implicit to language learning is culture, or the culture-specific way of using language.

Universality without uniformity – infants’ reactions to unresponsive partners in urban Germany and rural Ecuador

Previous studies based on non-WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) samples provide initial evidence that the still-face effect is universal. Based on the assumption that – independent of their cultural niches – infants share some fundamental expectations of social interactions, we put forth the assumption that a universal response exists for when a social interaction is interrupted. At the same time, we hypothesized that the size of the effect depends on the typicality of the interaction that precedes the adult partners’ interruption. To test these hypotheses, we conducted the Still-Face Paradigm (SFP) with infants (3- and 4.5-month-olds) from two cultural milieus, namely Münster (urban Germany) and the Kichwa ethnic group from the northern Andes region (rural Ecuador), as these contexts presumably offer different ways of construing the self that are associated with different parenting styles, namely distal and proximal parenting. Furthermore, we developed a paradigm that comes much closer to the average expected environment of Kichwa infants, the “No-Touch Paradigm” (NTP). Overall, the results support our initial hypothesis that the still-face effect is universal. Moreover, infants from both cultural milieus responded to the no-touch condition with a change in negative affect. At the same time, some of the infants’ responses were accentuated in a culture-specific way: Kichwa infants had a stronger response to an interruption of proximal interaction patterns during the NTP. While our findings underline infants’ universal predisposition for face-to-face interaction, they also suggest that cultural differences in internalized interactions do influence infant behavior and experience and, in turn, development.

Gender differences in emotional reminiscing in a Scandinavian sample.

Emotional reminiscing is a context where children learn culture-specific ways of understanding past emotional experiences through parentally scaffolded conversations, and learn how to connect these disparate experiences into their developing autobiographical memory. The goal of the present investigation was to explore possible gender differences in emotional reminiscing in an egalitarian cultural context (Denmark). Mothers and fathers from families (N = 88) reminisced about a happy and a sad past event with their 4.5-year-old children. Parents' and children's contributions were coded for emotion words, emotion attributions, and explanations. The emotional content did not differ as a function of parent or child gender. However, Danish children talked more about emotions overall with their mothers compared to their fathers. The results are discussed in light of the socio-cultural practices.

‘What you’ve got is a right to silence’

In the Northern Territory of Australia (NT), it has long been recognised that the right to silence ‘caution’ is difficult to communicate, particularly with some Aboriginal suspects. This article reviews paraphrases used by NT police to explain the right, asking how they could be understood by Aboriginal people and offering initial conclusions about the meaning of paraphrases involving choice, rights and force. Meanwhile, the consequences of staying silent are consistently omitted from police paraphrases, highlighting that suspects must recover important meaning from context. This article argues that a significant source of contextual knowledge about the caution is discourses about rights, which are a complex and culture-specific way of thinking and talking. There is every risk that suspects without required contextual knowledge fail to obtain anything useful from many versions of the caution, a situation which likely entrenches disadvantage in the justice system. To communicate the caution across a large cultural gap requires specifying more meaning, but only policy-makers can decide what information the caution is supposed to communicate and what effect it is supposed to have. Evaluation of potential cautions should ask whether they are comprehensible, informative and credible and ultimately what effect they have for relevant audiences.

Nicknaming tourism as development: commercialization of culture and nature in CHT, Bangladesh

ABSTRACT Tourism in Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) has nowadays been sensitized a prospective channel for the local development that generates a new socio-economic reality. It also provokes some critical issues regarding commercial use and its profit-making venture. This paper aims to understand how culture and nature are commercialized in the process of crafting a ‘uniqueness’ of CHT that materialize the public and private policies of tourism development, and how tourism is branded by the development actors as a potential means of local development. The study found that the tourism expansion has increasingly been nicknamed as development and impelled indigenous participation to the economic benefits, in which process culture and nature became saleable products. A considerable number of locals and tourists as informants were sampled and interviewed between November 2019 and early February 2020. This study adopted by qualitative methods, tried to explore the local perceptions of tourism development and its outcomes. The study contributed to the development of balanced tourism and its sustainable outcomes, and a deeper understanding of culture-specific ways.

The linguistic conceptualization in folk aesthetics

Abstract This Special Issue is dedicated to the analysis of the linguistic conceptualization of “beautiful” and “ugly” as the key concepts that are basic to aesthetic appreciation across languages and cultures within the framework of folk aesthetics. For this purpose, we present a collection of original research articles analyzing concepts related to folk aesthetics in seven languages: English, Spanish, Japanese, Russian, Danish, Persian, and Mandarin Chinese. All studies in this Special Issue focus on words and concepts as representations of culture-specific ways of aesthetic appreciation. Most of the studies are corpus-based, therefore they draw their conclusions on significant linguistic data.

The Universality and Variation of Flower Metaphors for Love in English and Chinese Poems

Metaphor is ubiquitous in everyday life, not only in language but also in action and thought (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). Difficult, intangible and abstract concept can be understood by applying metaphor. Emotion is viewed as a kind of abstract and private personal experience. Many of the metaphors have been studied by cognitive linguists over the past two decades, emotional metaphor is an important aspect of cognitive linguistics, and love has become one of the focuses of the researches. By applying the conceptual metaphor theory as a framework, this paper focuses on analyzing flower metaphors for love from the cross-cultural perspective based on figurative expressions in Chinese and English poems. The results of the study suggest that flower metaphors for love are likely to be near-universal at a general level in English and Chinese poems because of universal experiences, while cross-cultural variations and diversity exist in English and Chinese poems in culture-specific ways at a specific level in virtue of cognitive preferences.

Motzen und Moral

SummaryThe paper analyses complaining behaviour at the workplace across several languages (French, German in Austria and in Germany, Polish and Russian). As speech acts, complaints deal with socially unacceptable actions that are brought up as problematic issues retrospectively. This may include critical evaluative assessment or the request for compensation. Data have been collected using an online discourse completion task (DCT) including discourse scenarios in which the power distance between the participants as well as the weight of the transgression/misconduct varied. The results show that complaining strategies vary along several dimensions (e. g. mention of transgression +/-, justification of complaint +/-, way in which a solution or compensation is requested). The observed differences in complaining strategies can be interpreted in terms of culture-specific ways in which the relationship at the workplace is conceived of. Despite the general restrictions of DCT as a method of data collection, we suggest utilizing data and results derived from their analysis in the context of courses of intercultural business communication and of business language courses.

‘Die’ and its different situation-bound utterances in Persian

Abstract In this paper, using the tenets of Situation-Bound Utterances (SBUs) (Kecskes 2000, 2010) and referring to Pragmatic Act Theory (PAT) (Mey 2001), the verb mordan (‘to die’ in English), and its different realisations are analysed among Persian speakers. Through the analysis of authentic talk in interaction, this study aims to ponder nonstandard (situation-derived) meanings of the term mordan and its different SBUs. The primary focus of the study is on strings of linguistic events as well as the “conventions of usage” (Morgan 1978) or cultural understanding that may lead to standard and nonstandard meanings considering mordan and its different SBUs. The findings suggest that the SBUs regarding mordan, a neglected sociolinguistic context, not only is affected by its actual situational characteristics but also by prior context encoded in utterances used, which manifests culture-specific ways of thinking (Capone 2018; Wong 2010). Overall, 19 SBUs and 7 generic categories were identified with regard to the verb mordan in Persian. This paper exhibits that mordan is a versatile verb, which, when combined with situational/contextual factors, conveys different nonstandard functions that fulfil social needs. This study will also refer to linguistic features underlying SBUs that are influential in assigning various distinct meanings to the verb mordan in Persian.

Video observations of sensitivity in context: integrating insights from seven cultural communities

ABSTRACT This integrative discussion of the special issue on video observations of sensitive caregiving in different cultural communities provides a reflection on the seven empirical studies that comprise this special issue. The two main aims of this special issue are highlighted in terms of their overall conclusions: (1) video observations can be useful and reliable tools to assess sensitivity in non-Western cultural contexts; (2) caregiver sensitivity can be observed across very different cultural contexts and can be expressed in various culture-specific ways; (3) the Ainsworth sensitivity scale is particularly useful for capturing sensitivity regardless of modality. Further, the limitations of the set of studies as well as opportunities for future research are discussed.

Attempted and Completed Parricides in South Africa, 1990-2019.

Previous studies of parricide have been carried out predominantly in a Western context, in North America, Australia, and Western Europe. To date, only a handful of studies in parricide have been conducted in continental Africa. Previous studies in Ghana and Zimbabwe note that there may be culture-specific ways in which parricides may be shaped by the norms and cultural beliefs systems within those respective countries. Missing from the literature is an examination of parricides in South Africa. Using newspapers and court records, this article examines the offense and offender characteristics of parricides in South Africa. Our findings suggest that residential patterns of families may shape the offense characteristics found in South African parricides.

The correlations in experience principle: How culture shapes concepts of time and number.

People use space to conceptualize abstract domains like time and number. This tendency may be a cognitive universal, but the specifics of people's implicit space-time and space-number associations vary across cultures. In Western cultures, both time and numbers are arranged in people's minds along an imaginary horizontal line, from left to right, but in other cultures the directions of the mental timeline (MTL) and mental number line (MNL) are reversed. How does culture shape our abstract concepts? Using time and number as a testbed, we propose and test a general principle, which we call the CORrelations in Experience (CORE) principle, according to which different aspects of experience should selectively affect different abstract concepts. Across 3 training experiments, the MTL was shaped by experiences that provide a correlation between space and time, whereas the MNL was shaped by experiences that provide a correlation between space and number. These findings reveal that the MTL and MNL have distinct experiential bases, supporting the CORE principle and challenging the widespread claim that both mappings are determined by a common set of cultural experiences (e.g., reading, writing, visual scanning). The CORE principle provides an account of how domains like time and number, universal fixtures of the natural world, can be conceptualized in culture-specific ways: People spatialize abstract domains in their minds according to the ways those domains are spatialized in their experience. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Studying Cultural Differences in Emoji Usage across the East and the West

Global acceptance of Emojis suggests a cross-cultural, normative use of Emojis. Meanwhile, nuances in Emoji use across cultures may also exist due to linguistic differences in expressing emotions and diversity in conceptualizing topics. Indeed, literature in cross-cultural psychology has found both normative and culture-specific ways in which emotions are expressed. In this paper, using social media, we compare the Emoji usage based on frequency, context, and topic associations across countries in the East (China and Japan) and the West (United States, United Kingdom, and Canada). Across the East and the West, our study examines a) similarities and differences on the usage of different categories of Emojis such as People, Food & Drink, Travel & Places etc., b) potential mapping of Emoji use differences with previously identified cultural differences in users’ expression about diverse concepts such as death, money emotions and family, and c) relative correspondence of validated psycho-linguistic categories with Ekman’s emotions. The analysis of Emoji use in the East and the West reveals recognizable normative and culture specific patterns. This research reveals the ways in which Emojis can be used for cross-cultural communication.

The moderating role of cultural background in temporal framing: focusing on climate change awareness advertising

ABSTRACTApplying the framework of Construal Level Theory (CLT), this study tested the effects of an environmental ad describing the distant-future (i.e. end of the twenty-first century) vs. near-future (i.e. next summer) consequences of climate change using a sample of college students in the U.S. and South Korea. Consistent with the proposed empirical model in this study, lower perceived temporal distance of climate change generally led to higher perceived relevance of the event and more positive attitude and greater intention toward the sustainable consumption suggested in the ad (i.e. using Energy Star® qualified bulbs). However, the effects of temporal framing on the variables were moderated by the culture-specific ways in which the participants represented time and interpreted temporal information. In response to the distant-future frame, South Korean participants tended to report significantly shorter perceived temporal distance, thus presenting higher levels perceived relevance, stronger pro-environmental attitudes, and stronger behavioral intention than their U.S. counterparts. Overall, the findings of this study have meaningful implications for the external validity of CLT and for the development of effective climate change awareness campaigns targeting different audiences around the world.

QEOSA: A Pedagogical Model That Harnesses Cultural Resources to Foster Creative Problem-Solving.

The nature of creative thinking is complex and multifaceted, often involving cognitive processes and dispositions modulated by implicit cultural belief systems and ways of thinking. In this article, we build on existing research on the relations of creative thinking and culture, and explore how specific cultural resources can be harnessed to foster creative problem-solving in education. We first review the recent changes in our understanding of creative thinking, from an exclusive focus on cognitive processes to a more inclusive view of creative problem-solving as socially negotiated and culturally modulated, carrying important cultural functions. We then introduce a pedagogical model, QEOSA, to illustrate how cultural resources, particularly culture-specific ways of thinking about the world, can be harnessed to foster creative thinking in education, and what developmental and pedagogical considerations are involved to make it effective. We finally conclude this article by indicating the value of this line of work that integrates psychological, cultural, developmental, and educational principles in fostering the development of a creative mind-set with relevant knowledge, skills, dispositions, and values.