Cultural Psychology

This course sets the stage for the student’s exposure to Cultural Psychology with the prevalent, but often taken-for-granted debate on how culture is to be perceived. Having established the premises of this course’s approach to culture, we will locate Cultural Psychology within the schema of the Psychological discipline. In order to do so, we will expose the student to an appreciation of the circumstances within which the interest in Cultural Psychology emerged. This appreciation sets the backdrop upon which the foundation knowledge of the different approaches to the subject is built. As this course considers the current concerns of local and contemporary issues to be of utmost importance, this study commences by examining the relevance of Cultural Psychology within a multicultural context. Classical psychological experiments will be re-introduced from the alternative perspective of Cultural Psychology. Extensions to the cultural psychological perspective will be supported by experiments that prove the significant mediation of culture on psychological processes. The first to be addressed is how Identity is culturally mediated. The extent to which the desire for social affiliation defines an individual’s self-concept and the value of this extent across cultures is to be examined. The next subfield selected for discussion is Emotion. This course examines how the intangible and subjective dimension of emotions has been studied psychologically, and the extensions to this area of study by Cultural Psychology. The final segment to be examined is Cultural Psychology’s refinement of the study of Cognition and Perception. Having provided a selection of cultural psychological contributions to the study of Identity, Emotion, Cognition and Perception, the chapters respectively conclude with critiques of the cultural psychological framework. It goes to show that the establishment of a viable framework for Cultural Psychology is still work-in-progress.

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