An Interesting Article from in-mind.org

Link to the original article: http://beta.in-mind.org/node/380 

           The in-mind.org is a site in which you can read many interesting articles regarding important current issues and discoveries in Social Psychology. The web-site also provides a convinient service which shows readers the important headlines from many different Psychology magazines at one place. In-mind.org also provides readers with helpful video resources.

           An interesting article I read here today, was about a research conclusion that health promoting campaigns should also be adjusted according to each cultural contexts by which people are influenced. The writer divides the culture into two different categories: Individualistic culture and collectivistic culture. The writer claims that in individualistic cultures, like that of North America, United Kingdom, and etc, people become motivated to take care of their health when they are told about "positive" effects that certain acts will bring to them. For example, Americans would be more motivated to floss their teeth when they are told it will make their teeth healthy and therefore make their life happier. Whereas in collectivistic cultures, such as in Korea, people would be more motivated to floss their teeth, when they are warned with negative results that not-flossing their teeth will bring to them. There is a thread of connection between the result of the research and the overall attitude differences between people from individualistic and collectivistic culture. In individualistic society, an individual's major goal in life is to pursue the utmost happiness(unless it doesn't hurt other people). Thus, people pay their biggest attention on maximize their own happiness. On the other hand, people from collectivistic culture concentrates more on avoiding 'negative' incidents from happening in thier lives. It could be inferred that this is because, in collectivistic society, people regard it to be one of the biggest shame to be blamed publicly for their misakes or faults. Moreover, since they believe a person's mistake could also bring detrimental effects on overall society, people are both consciously and unconsciously more aware of negative consequences of their behavior, which may affect their social relationships.
            In addition, since people from collectivistic culture put much emphasis on their social relationship, they hesitate on revealing their problems to others(including psychiatrists, which explains why counseling institutions are not active in Asian countries) They, on the other hand tries to solve their own problems by themselves, often through social interaction, while not revealing their problems to their companions. However, people from individualistic cultures act the opposite. Another research furthermore suggests that 'subjective well-beingness' of  people from collectivist society tends to increase when they perceive 'not necessarily asked for' emotional supports from others. In contrast, there only existed weak relationships between the two variables, for those people from individualistic culture. I believe this explains why such unique and untranslatable word like 'Jung(情)' exists in Korean. 'Jung' is a word that stands for warm hearted feeling that ties people and neighbors together, which you do not necessarily have to express in words to show it. Although I haven't done a thorough research yet, I assume that such connection between people, and the words to express it also exists in other collectivistic cultures.