CSM

Note: This workshop was jointly held with Scientific Research on Priority Areas “Experimental Social Sciences” and Center for Experimental Research in Social Sciences, Hokkaido University.

Date: December 26, 2007 (Wednesday) 15:00-18:15

Location: Hokkaido University, The Humanities and Social Science Building, room W308

Speakers:
Takahiko Masuda (University of Alberta, Canada)
Oona Cha (Chung-Ang University, Korea)
Asuka Komiya (Kyoto University, Japan)

Participants: Toshio Yamagishi, Tatsuya Kameda, Masaki Yuki, Nobuyuki Takahashi, Keiko Ishii, Masanori Takezawa, Others (14 participants): Total 20 participants

Contents:

Presentation 1: Oona Cha
“Thinking “I” versus “we”: Cognitive consequences of independence versus interdependent self-construals”

Numerous studies have shown pronounced differences in reasoning and perception between East Asian and Western cultures. One theoretical account attributes these differences to differences in self-construal (i.e., interdependent in East Asia and independent in the West). Unfortunately, the role of self-construal is difficult to isolate in cross-cultural comparisons, given the complexity of the independent variable "culture." The present research fills a gap in this work by extending the priming approach to East Asian participants. In four experiments, participants were first primed with independence or interdependence by circling pronouns related to “I” or “we” in a paragraph and performed various cognitive tasks, which required context-independency (Stroop task in Experiment 1), context-dependency (location memory task in Experiment 2) or both (Letter identification Task in Experiment 3 and Framed-Line task in Experiment 4). The results showed that thinking of "I" versus "we" was able to shift Koreans' attention: Priming independence or “I” generally improved performance in context-independent tasks but obstructed performance in context-dependent tasks and vice versa for priming interdependence or “we”. Furthermore, it was found that this priming effect on attention was qualified by gender. This research proposes to understand cultural variations in cognition under the broader theme of independence versus interdependence.

Presentation 2: Asuka Komiya
“How do you feel regret?: Cultural dependency and independency of regret”

Historically, researchers have believed that people should feel emotions in the same way across cultures because they have acquired the universal physiological system of emotions. On the other hand, current studies in cultural psychology have shown that East Asians and North Americans feel emotions in different ways (e.g. Uchida et al., 2004), as well as thinking and attention. However, there have been few empirical studies dealing with both culturally independent aspect and dependent aspect of emotions. Through the two cross-cultural studies, I focused on cognitive processes of regret known as “a cognitive emotion,” and examined its universality and cultural dependency. In the first study, I collected daily regret situations from both American and Japanese students under the following two situations: “Personal” and “Interpersonal” situation. In the second study, using the regret situations collected in the first study as stimulus, I asked participants imagine and rate how they would feel regret in these situations (situation sampling method). As a result, both American and Japanese students classified the regret situations using the same axis, approach-avoidance, while they evaluated them in different way. Specifically, under personal situations, Americans feel more regret related to approach goals than avoidance goals, whereas Japanese feel as regret related to approach goals as related to avoidance goals. These findings suggested culturally specific interdependency between society and regret.

Presentation 3: Takahiko Masuda
“Language acquisition and its innateness: Re-considering cultural universals and specificities of language”

The issue of language acquisition has long been debated in the field of linguistics, psychology, and anthropology. One stream of research emphasizes the biological preparedness for language (e.g. Pinker, 1994). The assertions of this language instinct hypothesis have appealed to researchers who take an evolutionary explanation of human behavior. However, there is an alternative line of research, which emphasizes the language acquisition processes through infant-caregiver interactions (e.g. Tomasello, 1993). The accumulated evidence that supports their assertions has become a foundation of cultural explanation of human behavior. In this talk, I will accentuate differences in their theoretical assumptions, and address a possible direction of research on culture and language.