Mutual Influence between Culture and Mind: The Examination of Dissonance, Emotion, and Cultural Values.

Abstract

North American culture and East Asian culture are commonly characterized as independent and interdependent respectively. With three lines of research, this dissertation investigates cognitive, behavioral, and affective tendencies of people engaging in the two cultural contexts. The first line of research examines culturally divergent processes underlying choice justifications. It hypothesizes that European Americans justify their choice when the choice threatens their personal self-images whereas East Asians justify their choice when the choice threatens their public self-images. In support of this hypothesis, the studies found that European Americans justified their choice when it was made in private, but East Asians justified their choice when it was made in “public.” The second line of research investigates culturally different emotional experiences in success and failure situations. It hypothesizes that if people’s appraisal patterns differ across cultures, their emotional experiences should differ correspondingly. The studies found supporting evidence. Americans and Japanese experienced different emotions that corresponded to their agency appraisals. Moreover, when induced to make the same appraisal, Americans and Japanese experienced similar emotions. The third line of research hypothesizes that children’s stories play an important role in inculcating independent and interdependent values into new cultural members. This hypothesis was supported by the findings that American stories highlighted independent values such as self-direction and achievement whereas Japanese stories emphasized interdependent values such as conformity and group harmony. Analogous cultural differences were also found in the themes of stories freely composed by American and Japanese college students. These findings suggest that children’s stories are rich in culturally pertinent values, which are deeply incorporated into people’s mind and reproduced by them. In a larger scope, the present dissertation addresses the importance of understanding people’s minds in their cultural contexts and the roles culture plays in fostering psychological tendencies that are functional in people’s own societies.