PS 235 - Cross-Cultural Psychology

Cross-cultural psychology examines psychological phenomena in people from more than one cultural background. Studying abroad is a wonderful opportunity for deepening the understanding of another culture and at the same time learning more about your own culture. This course will provide you with a framework for reflecting upon cross cultural experiences in an academic way. For this reason you are also required to keep a cross cultural journal with weekly entries. We will take the most influential ideas in cross-cultural psychology as a starting point and look at some (cross) cultural studies afterwards. Hereby you will learn about some basic research methods in cross cultural psychology that you can use for your journal entries. Then we will discuss topics that have been playing an important role in cross cultural psychology, as they touch upon the underlying question of “culture specific or universal?” These topics are perception, development, education, language, morality, prejudice and the process of acculturation.