Your Culture May Influence Your Perception Of Death

From the 24 May 2011 Medical News Today article

Contemplating mortality can be terrifying. But not everyone responds to that terror in the same way. Now, a new study which will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds cultural differences in how people respond to mortality. European-Americans get worried and try to protect their sense of self, while Asian-Americans are more likely to reach out to others.

Much of the research on what psychologists call “mortality salience” – thinking about death – has been done on people of European descent, and has found that it makes people act in dramatic ways. “Men become more wary of sexy women and they like wholesome women more. People like to stereotype more. You see all these strange and bizarre occurrences when people think about the fact that they aren’t going to live forever,” says Christine Ma-Kellams of the University of California Santa Barbara, who carried out the research with Jim Blascovich. Particularly, people try to protect their sense of self, by putting down people who aren’t like them or distancing themselves from innocent victims. …..

Related articles

• Perception of death influences one’s action (news.bioscholar.com)
• How You Think About Death May Affect How You Act (Medical News Today)
• The More You Talk About Death, The Less You Fear It, Australia (Medical News Today)

Cultural Competence or Cultural Competency ?

This is a great blog entry, with bibliography, about how not understanding ethnic/cultural backgrounds can lead to misdiagnosis.

               Cultural Competence or Cultural Sensitivity? May 12, 2011

Some Related Resources

• Culture, Language, and Health Literacy (US Department of Health and Human Services)
• Health Literacy and Cultural Competency (US Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality)

Actions And Personality, East And West

From the April 12 2011 Medical News Today article

People in different cultures make different assumptions about the people around them, according to an upcoming study published inPsychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The researchers studied the brain waves of people with Caucasian and Asian backgrounds and found that cultural differences in how we think about other people are embedded deep in our minds. Cultural differences are evident very deep in the brain, challenging a commonsense notion that culture is skin deep.