Culture, Psychology, and Education

In my view, the study of culture provides three main contributions to our understanding of human behavior and mental processes. First there is great knowledge to impart about cultural similarities and differences in behavior, and these form the basis for improving psychological theories. Second the study of culture is a prime example of critical thinking in the field, as cross-cultural research begs the question about whether our notions of truth and psychological principles are applicable to people beyond those whom were studied. Third research on intercultural adjustment provides us with clues about possible psychological constructs that may be universally necessary for adjusting to life well in a pluralistic and diverse environment. I discuss these contributions, and reframe thinking about the goals of education focusing on these skills. Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. This article is available in Online Readings in Psychology and Culture: http://scholarworks.gvsu. edu/orpc/vol2/iss1/4 My Introduction to Cross-Cultural Psychology Quite frankly, when I was an undergraduate at the University of Michigan and even as a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, I never imagined that studying culture would become such a major part of my career or that I would become so strongly identified as a cross-cultural psychologist. I was interested in mainstream topics like emotion, communication, and clinical psychology, but not from a cross-cultural standpoint. I never took a cross-cultural course (I don't even know if one existed) or any related course in other disciplines such as anthropology (although now I wish I had). Although my very first study was cross-cultural, even that was a matter of coincidence. I like kids and was originally interested in how they seemingly understand the emotions of the adults around them even though they do not necessarily understand language. I designed a simple study that examined how children perceived emotion through paralinguistic cues. During the summer between my junior and senior years in college I was in Japan training in judo, which I have been doing since I was 7, and I thought that since I was going there I might collect the same data in Japan as well. (Now that I look back, that's really not a great way to think about and conduct cross-cultural research! ) So I enlisted the aid of a psychologist whom I knew and together we created stimuli and collected the data in Japanese preschools. When I came back to Michigan I collected data there as well and completed my thesis, which was my first cross-cultural study (Matsumoto & Kishimoto, 1983). Still, culture did not enter my mind when I entered the clinical psychology graduate program at UC Berkeley, as neither my coursework nor my research was centered on culture. I was a therapist-in-training completing classes in personality, psychopathology, and treatment, as well as practica. My research was centered on emotion but was not necessarily cross-cultural, as I was interested in emotion and depression, emotion and motivation, and emotion in kids. While a few of my studies were published (Matsumoto, 1983, 1987; Matsumoto & et al., 1986; Matsumoto & Sanders, 1988), they were not centered on culture. At the end of graduate school, I decided to devote all my time to teaching and research. Part of my decision was based on my frustration with clinical work. Looking back, this frustration stemmed from several factors. For one, I really was not a very patient person, especially in the face of ambiguity or uncertainty (I hope I am a little better now! ). Because clinical work is inherently ambiguous, it did not really match my personality well even though I think I had a genuine interest in helping people. Also, I was just too young to appreciate and understand people's life struggles, having gone straight to graduate school after college and having been in school all of my life. There is probably a lot to be said 3 Matsumoto: Culture, Psychology, and Education Produced by The Berkeley Electronic Press, 2011 about the contribution of life experiences to one's attitude and effectiveness as a therapist or counselor. But above all, I remember being very skeptical about how this "talking stuff" could really work in helping others. I wanted to solve problems, make concrete goals and plans, and deal with objective behaviors rather than deal with psychodynamics or childhood experiences or unconscious processes. Clinical work, or at least the clinical work I was learning, just did not fit right with my worldview and way of being. It was only years later did I come to realize that this mismatch was largely culturally based as much as anything else. Cross-Cultural Research on Emotion Judgments My interest in culture got a boost in the latter half of graduate school when I worked as a research assistant for Paul Ekman on a project examining cultural differences in attributions of intensity when judging universal facial expressions of emotion in 10 cultures (Ekman et al., 1987). This was the first study to report cultural differences as all previous studies had reported cultural similarities in emotion recognition (Ekman, 1972, 1973, 1982; Ekman & Friesen, 1971; Ekman & Friesen, 1975; Ekman, Friesen, & Ellsworth, 1972; Ekman, Sorenson, & Friesen, 1969; Izard, 1971). I had decided to follow up this study for my dissertation, and to do so it was necessary to create stimuli expressed by people of visibly different cultural backgrounds. So we created the Japanese and Caucasian Facial Expressions of Emotion (Matsumoto & Ekman, 1988), a stimulus set that is widely used by many research laboratories around the world today. Using it we obtained judgments of emotion intensity from American and Japanese observers and showed that the cultural differences in intensity ratings originally reported by Ekman et al. (1987) existed regardless of the perceived race or sex of the expressor (Matsumoto & Ekman, 1989). I subsequently replicated these findings across different ethnic (Matsumoto, 1993) and cultural groups as well (Biehl et al., 1997). I have continued this line of research ever since. Recently we showed that the cultural differences in intensity ratings are dependent on the type of rating obtained. Americans tend to rate the intensity of the external display greater than do Japanese, but the Japanese tend to rate the intensity of the presumed subjective experience of the expressor greater than do Americans (Matsumoto, Kasri, & Kooken, 1999). I thought this occurred because the Japanese rated subjective experience higher than external display while there was no difference between these ratings for Americans. But post-hoc analyses actually showed the opposite; there was no difference between the two rating types for the Japanese while the Americans rated external display significantly higher than presumed experience. In other words, the Japanese were not suppressing their intensity ratings as we had interpreted over the years; it was the Americans who were exaggerating their ratings of external display relative to presumed internal experience. Recently we have also found that cultural differences in intensity ratings are dependent on the intensity of the expressions being judged (Matsumoto et al., 2002). When judging high intensity, full-face expressions the cultural differences reported above 4 Online Readings in Psychology and Culture, Unit 2, Subunit 1, Chapter 4 http://scholarworks.gvsu. edu/orpc/vol2/iss1/4 occur. When judging low intensity expressions, however, the cultural differences are different; the Japanese rate subjective experience greater than external display while there is no difference for the Americans. These findings suggested that when strong expressions are perceived, the Japanese felt that the situation must have been such that the expression was justified and thus made no difference between ratings of external display and internal experience. But Americans are used to seeing such strong displays and know that there are display rules to exaggerate one's expressions; thus they think that a person is actually feeling less emotion than they are showing. When weak expressions are perceived the Americans think the person is showing what they feel, but the Japanese think that the person may be feeling more emotion than they show, and thus rate internal experience higher than external display. The Contributions of Cross-Cultural Research to Psychology Findings like these and others from my laboratory as well as those of my colleagues over the years have highlighted the importance of culture in understanding human behavior. Increasingly intrigued by culture, over a decade ago I started to review the cross-cultural literature in all areas of psychology (Matsumoto, 2000). I came to realize that culture played as basic and important a role in understanding and contributing to human behavior as did any other influence on our lives, and to gradually understand its pervasive and profound influence on psychological processes in all areas of functioning. My review suggests that there are at least three major areas of contributions that cross-cultural research has made to psychology: contributions to knowledge, contributions to the critical thinking process, and the identification of the psychological factors underlying interand intracultural adjustment.