Monday, January 29, 2007

Diverse Minds: A look at how our differences affect Psychology


A few decades ago it would have been unheard of to find a Jewish, African-American and Caucasian female from Maryland married to a Catholic, Mexican-American male from California. In society today, however, diversity is the norm and relationships and interactions as multi-faceted as this occur all over the world. Besides race, gender, and religion people may, and often do, associate themselves with varying cultural backgrounds and ethnic groups. The formation of a person’s character is complex and unique. It occurs over an entire lifetime and involves the influences of cultural factors such as lifestyle and behavior like diet and exercise, attitudes and beliefs about health and illness, as well as environmental factors like geography and the health care system in which one is immersed. Due to this great increase in diverse cultural interactions, there has been an increasing interest in the psychological research and the means by which to obtain the most accurate and beneficial information from clinical testing in this field.

Although the terms are not binding, most cultural psychologists believe that certain traits are culture-specific while cross-cultural psychologists most commonly believe in an overlap or similarity across different cultural groups. There is great evidence that some behavioral traits are common among all humans such as the tendency towards similar ways of expressing certain emotions such as anxiety, fear, happiness, and sadness. However when dealing with more specific psychological disorders such as depression we may see drastic differences across cases. For example, Patricia Greenfield, a cultural psychologist, argues that there is a cultural framework surrounding psychological tests that is not universally shared. This means that a test created by one individual of a given background is not applicable to another individual of a different background due to its lack of empathy towards those differences. Obstacles such as this one would therefore make it nearly impossible to evaluate clinical results and compare them across cultures. This debate has been ongoing for a number of years now, and does not seem to be coming any closer to a resolution.

The research we have today is much more extensive for some groups than for others. Caucasians continue to be extensively tested, and we therefore have a lot of information on their ethnic group. Minority groups such as African Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Asian Americans have begun to join in this process and provide more data for psychological research. Besides this obvious dilemma, the true problem lies in the fact that these tests and their results are not simply black and white. They can be interpreted very differently by the numerous people involved including both administers and the subjects. Some problems that may affect these results include researchers’ inability to free themselves of stereotypical thinking or biases or a subjects inability to relate to only one group and therefore difficulty in consistently portraying their true feelings. The results of many studies have been indecisive or ambiguous, resulting in information that still leaves the researchers wondering about the validity of testing and the ability to perform tests over various cultures.

Our diversity is one of our greatest assets and should be embraced. When dealing with associations of ethnicity, race, religion, culture, and the like however, it is most important to look at the individual as a separate entity that is not solely classified in the terms of those narrow guidelines. Because the combinations of one’s background are endless, it is impossible to assume the traits a person will have or how they will react to different situations based on generalizations about a group he/she may belong to. The research done to evaluate the significance of these factors is important nonetheless as it ultimately allows professionals in the psychology field to better understand its patients and therefore provide them with more specialized and productive care.