Belonging to several cultural groups at the same time can be associated with complex feelings of group membership. In this post, I will provide an explanation for the phenomenon whereby many immigrants marginalize—feel detached from the mainstream culture they live in and the heritage culture they grew up in—while feeling happy.
When individuals live actively with two cultures (in families, organizations or society at large) they, partly unconsciously, partly deliberately, may change towards acquiring a ‘bicultural mind’. I will discuss here, is whether these individuals are capable of spontaneously producing appropriate responses that fit the expectation patterns of either of their two cultures.
In a recent cross-cultural study of Facebook users in Japan and the US, I show that Japanese SNS users are more concerned about Internet privacy than American SNS users. And it turns out that because Americans have higher general trust, they less likely to believe that a stranger would take advantage of their private information, should it be leaked online.
Making and keeping friends: Strategy matters
Friendships can be tough work. Whether it’s making them or maintaining them, friendships usually require effort. If you’re from a Western country, this likely involves trusting and relying on others, and confidently communicating your strengths and your struggles. Let’s call these your strategies for relational success: Let people know what sort of friend you are, and you’ll increase your chances of finding and keeping a desirable friend.
Issue
Play dates or homework? Piano lessons or TV? Mothers generally want the best for their children. However, what is ‘the best’? Happiness or academic achievement? And, how should parents go about raising their children in the ‘best’ way possible? One answer to this question is to be a ‘tiger parent’. This rather harsh ‘Chinese’ parenting style has been advocated to guarantee successful children. In this post, I will discuss if this means that all mothers should become a bit more ferocious when it comes to parenting.
Do you feel the need to feel good about yourself in order to be happy? Research suggests that if you have a lot of opportunities to make new friends, it is more likely that you will answer this question with a ‘yes’ than when you have more of a set group of people you spend time with. In this blog, I will describe the recent research on the influence of relational mobility and how it relates to the way in which we develop our self-esteem and happiness.
Shameless self-promotion on Facebook. Love it or hate it, there’s always someone doing it. And many of us are guilty of it. But why do we do it? Comparing Facebook users in the US and Japan, I suggest it’s the power of the social context that may determine who struts their stuff, and why.
Although popular belief (and a heartwarming children’s song) holds that we all laugh in the same language, recent research has found that people are remarkably adapt at detecting local accents in the way that emotions are expressed. In this blog, I will review the research that suggests that the long-assumed universality of emotions is limited.
As a world without colors would be extremely boring, we are luckily able to perceive various different colors that enrich our environment. Recently, Keiko Ishii and colleagues found that the colors we prefer and use for our paintings vary systematically across cultures. But that doesn’t mean that tomorrow’s multi-cultural world is becoming black-and-white or grey, rather there is hope that it will become even more colorful than it is today. In this post, we will illustrate how individuals and cultures engage in mutual construction and thus enhance variety.