Asian Infusion in General Psychology

1.	Chap1:	What is Psychology? Introduction and Methods
Unit 1:	Perspectives: Buddhism and the Cognitive and Humanistic Perspectives
Unit 2:	Scientific method: Representative Samples
2.	Chap2:	Theories of personality
Unit 3:	Sociocultural Perspective: Individualist and Collectivist personalities
3.	Chap3:	Lifespan changes
Unit 4:	Development of Racial Identity
4.	Chap4:	Neurons, Hormones and the Brain
5.	Chap5:	Sensation and Perception
Unit 5:	Buddhist Perspective on The Senses and Perception
6.	Chap6:	Thinking and Intelligence
7.	Chap7:	Memory
8.	Chap8:	Learning
9.	Chap9:	Social and Cultural influences
Unit 6:	Acculturation versus ethnic identity
Unit 7:	Cross-Cultural Relations
10.	Chap10:	Psychological disorders
Unit 8:	Case Study of Mrs. Fang in China: Cultural context of Diagnosis
11.	Chap11:	Treatment
12.	Chap12:	Emotion, Stress and Health
13.	Chap13:	Motivation

 

Module 1: Perspectives: Relating Buddhism to Cognitive and Humanistic Perspectives

Cognitive perspective: focus on interpretation, information processing. Thoughts lead to emotions, irrational thoughts lead to inappropriate emotions, e.g. depression results from loss.
Buddhist perspective: <br>Eliminate suffering by overcoming ignorance (cognitive restructuring).
Suffering is due to desires: desire for pleasure, desire for continued existence. Wrong to find happiness in material things or in the present life, since death is inevitable.
Impermanence: things change. Ignorance of this leads to "suffering of change."

Humanistic perspective: people are basically good and have bad behaviors only when there are obstacles, unique subjective experience is valid, theories not based on scientific research.
Buddhist perspective: Happiness, bliss is the natural state of mind. One is happy when pollution is eliminated. Goal: developing insight into true nature of reality.

Contrast: Humanistic perspective is reaction against determinism, i.e. every behavior has a cause. On the other hand, Buddhist concept of Karma: cause and effect: suffering depends on causes. Removing causes, i.e. false ideas about what is pleasurable, worthwhile, or desirable. Also, Buddhism considered most scientific of religion, since it believes in empiricism, i.e. try it and observe what happens.

Module 2: Scientific method: representative samples:

Population of interest: Humans.
Sample: often unrepresentative (North American, College Freshmen, European American College Freshman, and prior to 1970's usually male). Sample of convenience and experimenter bias.
Contrast to goals of Multicultural psychology: Diversity in geography, socio-economic class, ethnicity, gender, etc. of participants and researchers.

Omission: approximately 22% of world population:
• Han Chinese: largest ethnic group in the world (1.2 billion)
  
• Diaspora Han Chinese includes CCSF students American-born, Taiwan, Hong Kong, China, Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand & other countries.
  
• 35% of CCSF credit students are Asian/Pacific Islander, largely Han

Module 3: Sociocultural perspective on personality development: Individualist versus Collectivist

Individualist:
• define self as autonomous
• priority to individual, personal goals
• value independence, leadership. achievement, self-fulfillment
• individual's attitudes and preferences (dispositional attribution) heavily influence behavior

Collectivist:
• self as interdependent part of groups
  
• priority to needs and goal of the group, e.g. Confucism social order, family obligation
• value group harmony, duty, obligation, security
• group norms (situational attribution) heavily influence behavior

Module 4: Racial Identity.

Erikson's Stages of Development: State 5--Identity versus Role Confusion
Minority Identity Development:
1. conformity w/ group depreciating and discriminatory toward other minorities,
2. dissonance between group-depreciating and group-appreciating,
3. resistance & immersion (self-appreciating),
4. introspection on basis of self-appreciating,
5. integrative awareness with self-appreciating and selective appreciation of dominant group.

White Identity Development:
1. precontact: awareness of one's own cultural heritage plus "ethnic dinners, cultural tours"
2. conflict in awareness of one's privileges and prejudices, more extensive knowledge of other cultures
3. pro-minority anti-racism, further immersion into other cultures, interracial encounters
4. retreat into white culture, awareness of and dealing with one's own fear and anger, knowledge of race identity development
5. redefinition and integration, develops identity that claims Whiteness as a part of it, expand knowledge on racism

Unit 5: The Senses and Perception, a Buddhist perspective

1. form: things that constitute physical world, including sense organs (eye, ear, nose, tongue, body & mind)
2. feelings: sensation of things: pleasure, unpleasant, and neutral. Result of senses coming into contact with objects
3. discriminations: differentiations we make regarding objects of perception as a result of contact
4. consciousness: six types of consciousnesses: eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, and mind
5. compositional factors: voluntary activities, both good and bad. Includes karma which directs the mind in particular directions.

What is the "self?" Who is watching, listening, sensing?
Ordinarily we thinks that something exists apart from and independently of these aggregate. Buddhist belief: "self" is nothing more than a label given to these constantly changing factors.

Western belief: the ghost in the machine, the homunculus.

Unit 6: Acculturation versus ethnic identity

1. assimilation ("I'm an American", identify with dominant culture--might be unaware or shameful of ethnic origins, or national pride)
2. separatist ("I'm Chinese", identify with ethnicity--isolated communities, or ethnic pride)
3. bicultural ("I'm a Chinese American", combination)
4. marginal ("I'm a human," no national or ethnic identity--might not acknowledge, understand, appreciate differences)

Unit 7: Cross-Cultural Relations
Ethnocentrism: superiority of one's one ethnic group
Us-Them thinking, example of China as a multicultural and multiethnic nation, and using a common enemy to unite (model from Dru Gladney)
Toi Shan vs. Chong-Shan (opposite sides of Pearl River), but against Hakka, we are all Cantonese
Cantonese vs. Hakka, but against Northerners, we are all Southerners
Southerners vs. Northerners, but against Minorities, we are all Han
Han vs. Minorities, but against Foreigners, we are all ChineseAsian Infusion

Unit 8: Case Study of Mrs. Fang in China: Cultural context of Diagnosis

July 1991, Mrs. Fang came several hundred miles from a rural county town in People's Republic of China to a major urban medical center. She complained of headaches, dizziness, visual symptoms, numbness, and whole body pain that had incapacitated her for two years. She told the story with which she had been preoccupied with or many months.

In 1989 when pregnant with her second child, she was forced to have an abortion in the third trimester of pregnancy. It was her third abortion since 1986. Each abortion, she claims, was forced upon her by the leaders of her work unit. Since l989 she has been grieving and in a state of continuous pervasive anger.

1. What is your diagnosis of Mrs. Fang?
(post-traumatic stress disorder: survivor of controllable, unpredictable trauma. The individual may re-live trauma in reoccurring thoughts or dreams, may have psychic numbing, difficulty in concentration for decades.)

The stress-related condition might be seen as the effect of a forced abortion late in the pregnancy. From an individualistic perspective, this the one-child-per-family policy of China is seen as a violation of personal choice imposed by an authoritarian government.

However, there is more to Mrs. Fang story, as told by the co-worker who accompanied her. To understand the narrative, we have to position ourselves in her world: a factory in a modest-sized rural country town in a poor and remote region. The factory has been repeatedly criticized by the local population control authority for failing to enforce the one-child policy.

Mrs. Fang was aware of this campaign, and in fact had been requested to have early abortion in two previous pregnancies. However, since she and her husband had good relationships with the leaders of her work unit, she believed that once a second child was born, the work unit would have no recourse but to accept the child. Therefore, she hid her pregnancy. She did so, even though her friends and coworkers, who also wanted more than one child, had agreed collectively to avoid pregnancy for a limited time, while the work unit was trying to get out of the spotlight of political criticism. After a while, the workers had agreed, the intensity of the campaign would abate, as it had so often in the past, and it would be possible to secretly negotiate additional births in the work unit.

When Mrs. Fang's pregnancy became obvious the third trimester, the entire work unit--workers and leaders--, were deeply angered. They accused her of being selfish and reckless. She was also accused of breaking the social compact, and thereby threatening the entire community, including those women who had no children yet. She brazenly responded that all of the accusations were unfortunately true but beside the point, since she would soon be delivering a baby. This created pandemonium in her unit, and she was told her behavior was unacceptable. Why should she be given special license, they demanded, especially when she had betrayed a social strategy aimed at assisting all the women in the unity, and had lied to them to boot?

Mrs. Fang's response was like pouring cooking oil on an open fire. She again agreed with all the accusation, but smiling at her comrades, Mrs. Fang told them they would just have to accept it, whether they liked it or not, since they were now stuck with the result.

The members of the work unit were outraged. Furthermore, when the population control authorities learned of the pregnancy, the work unit's leaders had a crises that had gone beyond the boundaries of their control. The results were a collective demand for abortion, a suicide attempt by Mrs. Fang's husband after she told him he was too weak to protect her and the fetus, a suicidal attempt by Mrs. Fang herself (which the workers thought was insincere and manipulative), the forced abortion, and prolonged grieving. After two years of illness that was depleting the work unit's medical insurance fund, Mrs. Fang suffering was now causing more conflict.

2. Now, what is your diagnosis of Mrs. Fang?

• Not post-traumatic stress disorder. Mrs. Fang is not a passive recipient of political pressure or violence
• there is not single trauma story--each participant tells a different, even conflicting story
• Mrs. Fang's persistent symptoms are in part a result of Mrs. Fang's persistence. Mrs. Fang helps to create it.

  More likely diagnosis, given the cultural context:

• personality disorder; inflexible and maladaptive patterns that can cause distress for the individual, or for the people interacting with the individual.

3. Describe Mrs. Fang's behavior using collectivist and individualist perspectives.
Mrs. Fang acted in a maladaptive manner in a collectivist culture where social harmony is given priority over individual goals. In an individualistic culture she might be seen as a heroic woman who was attacked by an angry mob simply because she wanted a child, a desire against all odds.