How did I become the person I am becoming today?

Research Story: Interdependence of Emotion

Imagine you’re at a party. You feel happy, but why? The answer might depend on biological factors. What is happening in the brain with happy emotions? Neurotransmitters are released and we experience joy. This could feel like an unsatisfying explanation if your happiness is due to a personal achievement, or perhaps sharing a joyful moment with friends. The answer could also depend on your cultural background.

In their work, psychologists Uchida, Nakayama, and Bowen found that people from different cultures have distinct theories and perceptions about emotions. In “independent” cultures, like many Western societies, emotions are often seen as purely individual, personal experiences. You’re happy because you got an A on your exam, or anxious because you’re worried about your future.^[1]

In contrast, in “interdependent” cultures, common in East Asia, emotions are viewed as inherently social. Your happiness at a party is not just about you. Instead, the emotions you may feel are about the connections you are making and the shared experience with others.

This idea, called the Interdependence of Emotion (IOE), also affects how people perceive and express emotions. For instance, during interviews about their achievements, Japanese Olympic athletes talked about emotions mostly in relation to their teammates and supporters, while North American athletes focused on personal achievements. This example of differences between interdependent and independent cultures highlights how emotions are processed differently among cultures.

This cultural lens can even affect how we interpret others’ emotions. In one study, Japanese participants were more likely than Canadians to consider the expressions of people surrounding a target individual when judging that person’s emotional state.^[2]

 Cultural interdependence primes a person to take into account context, situations, and interpersonal relationships to influence emotions, while cultural independence promotes a worldview where people, situations, and emotions are not as interconnected. As a result, individuals from independent cultures tend to be more individualistic in their emotions and less attuned to the emotions of others.

Understanding these cultural differences in emotional perception is not just confined to academic papers or classrooms. How people understand and perceive others’ emotional states have real-world implications. For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, cultures with an interdependent perspective might have been more motivated by empathy and social responsibility when adhering to public health guidelines.^[3] In contrast, communities with an independent worldview were less likely to comply with public health guidelines and addressed the pandemic less effectively. The United States’ structural inequality and individualistic culture played a role in the disproportionate amount of deaths during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic.^[4] A lack of collective empathy and care for others can actually have devastating consequences.

Key Integrative Theme: Psychological, biological, social, and cultural factors influence behavior and mental processes.

The concept of IOE provides an example of this chapter’s key theme. “Emotion” can be considered a mental process while the expression of a particular emotion is a behavior. To explain why we feel the way we do, and to predict how we will feel in the future, we must consider several factors. Emotion develops biologically. For example, we feel signals in our bodies and our minds, then our brain makes sense of those feelings to give them their respective emotional label, such as happiness or anxiety. Our interpretation of those bodily sensations is a psychological action which can be influenced by our social world. For example, if your family teaches you that “good” grades in school are something to feel happy about, you are more likely to feel happy when you earn an A and unhappy when you don’t. Further, how we express our happiness and explain why you are having that emotion is likely different depending on our culture.

How might someone from an independent culture express and explain their happy feelings? What about someone from an interdependent culture?

How did I become the person I am becoming today?

Some people taking a psychology course seek an answer to the question above. The quest to understand ourselves is the reason that many begin their journey in this field. Others seek to understand the people around them – why they do what they do. Others may even seek to influence or change the people around them.  These are all things psychologists do –
explain and predict human behavior.

Consider all of the factors that make up who you are today. For example, who did you live with growing up? If you are genetically related to the people who raised you, are there hereditary influences you are aware of? Did your family follow one religion, several, or none? What was your school and community like? What country did you live in? Are there opportunities that you wish you had that you did not? All of these factors play a part in shaping who you are today.

The Biopsychosocial Model

Our key theme is closely related to the biopsychosocial model  (see Figure 2.4), a holistic approach to understanding how we become who we are and how we are (mental and physical health). Through this perspective, we see the overlap between biological, psychological, and social factors and their interactive contributions to our health and well-being.^[5]

Biological factors include examining the impact of genes, brain and nervous system function, and physical health. Psychological factors include significant life events, emotions, distress, beliefs, and expectations. Finally, social influences include interpersonal factors such as social interactions, relationships, community experiences, and culture. Clearly, what we do, think, and feel at any given moment is highly context-dependent and can’t just be looked at in isolation.^[6]

It is probably not surprising that psychologists are increasingly recognizing the importance of contextual influences – such as ethnicity, race, ability, gender, sexual orientation, religion, and other cultural norms – and incorporating those contexts into their research. Additionally, unequal distribution of wealth and resources across the United States and across the world leads to vastly different opportunities and experiences for people, depending on who they are and where they live. Not surprisingly, these lived experiences interact with biological and other individual factors in determining how people think, feel, and behave in different situations. Thus, it is important to include perspectives from a variety of cultures if we want psychology to truly reflect the full range of the human condition. This view of human psychology as context-dependent has only recently taken hold as a dominant understanding of the human condition and is part of the movement away from W.E.I.R.D. science.

All of this is to say, the answer to the question of “How did we become the people we are becoming today?” is complicated and must include an understanding of how the brain and nervous system works, how humans develop cognitively and physically, and how our social and cultural interactions shape us. Psychologists study all of these things and more, in order to develop predictions about human behavior.

Predicting human thoughts, feelings, and behavior

At times, psychology seems like mostly common sense. Some people may hear the results of a psychological study  and say “Of course, everyone knows that!” Sometimes, even when they discover evidence their common sense has misled them, they cannot let go of what they think they know. Maybe they find a reason to dismiss the evidence or argue that their personal experience is more valid. Although there is much truth in personal experience, it does not correspond as well to general human behavior than results from well-executed study.

For example, say you have found what works well for you as a student. Could you then claim to know that “this is the best way for everyone to learn?” When psychologists make a claim about “how humans learn” they rely on data from diverse populations, in various situations, at different ages, and at different education levels. While your statement is true for you, the claim from psychological science would apply to many or even most people, depending on how the study was run . Understanding this difference is important for developing critical thinking and helps us to identify what we know based on evidence, rather than what we think  we know or want to know. From there, we can make better decisions and be more effective in pursuit of our respective goals.

Explaining behavior is the first step. We can then use that data to predict. Just explaining why people are the way they are is not very useful. Predicting how they might behave in the future in different situations, or how they will learn or become motivated, gives psychologists direction. Educators, event planners, organizations, and more can then craft environments such as schools, workplaces, and digital spaces to achieve desired outcomes.

How confident do you feel in your judgment of these statements? Take a moment to note your confidence for each response and what, if any, explanation you might have for your answers. Also, think about what you would say if the statements were more open-ended, rather than true or false. Some questions are not easily answered as “True” or “False”. Was that the case for any of these statements? If so, make some notes about how you would explain your answer.

It is human nature to want clear answers, preferably with simple explanations, so it might not have been difficult to choose either true or false for the above questions. Some of you may have wanted to explain more “true for X, or false only if Y.” The human brain is incredibly complex, and therefore, so are we. Although, sometimes an explanation for something is so obvious we miss it (because we think it is complicated), more often we tend to come up with an explanation for our or someone else’s behavior that is much too simple to truly capture the situation.

Why do we do this? One reason is that humans are not only complex, but we also tend to like certainty. A nuanced or complicated answer lacks certainty and can feel like trying to hold water in our hands.^[8]

The Domains of Psychology

Each of the factors in our key integrative theme (psychological, biological, and social) can be considered as one of the traditional domains of psychology. Domains are one way the field of psychology has been broken down and organized according to distinct content areas. They are a way to identify the general area in which a psychologist focuses their work – for example, a social psychologist studies humans in social contexts, and a biological psychologist studies how the brain and nervous system work to influence our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Though, as you will learn, there is often overlap across psychological domains.

The following paragraphs describe the different domains and what is typically included in each.
Each of the seven key themes integrates these domains to explain and predict human psychology.

The Cognitive Domain

Every day, we make a truly uncountable number of decisions. Some decisions are automatic and do not  require much thought, while others are active and require planning or deliberation. These decisions can be deciding what to focus on, or what to exclude from our attention, what our goals are, what to plan for, and even what to remember. These cognitive mechanisms are called executive functions, or a group of behaviors targeted at the efficient processing of our environment, which play a continuous role in our day-to-day lives. Executive functions include attention, working memory, inhibition, and cognitive flexibility.
These functions also influence our skill levels in other areas such as language processing and language acquisition. These processes are associated with the prefrontal cortex, the region of the brain in charge of higher-order planning and processing. While the idea of cognition can seem elaborate, the end goal is to process our environment most efficiently.

Executive functioning typically falls under the cognitive domain, but it is quite impossible to explain even a summary of human functioning with only one domain. When studying cognition, we must take into account brain processes (biological domain) and language (developmental domain).
 

The Biological Domain

To understand the workings of the mind, we need to understand the mechanisms of the brain. The brain’s ultimate goal is survival, so every hemisphere, region, and structure within the brain has its own distinct set of skills necessary for navigating daily life. The central nervous system, comprised of the brain and spinal cord, has its own special cells called neurons. These neurons are involved in elaborate processes of our consciousness, including, but not limited to, learning, memory, sleep, perception, and responses to pharmacological agents. Neurons create neural pathways which communicate across brain regions. Learning about the biological domain includes understanding the functions of neurons, the purpose of different brain structures/regions (also referred to as localization of function), the difference between consciousness and altered consciousness, and how all of these contribute to personality and behaviors.
 

The Developmental Domain

An often overlooked but foundational discipline of psychology is developmental psychology. Most people believe developmental psychology is merely the psychological study of children, but this field is concerned with the change over time encompassing the entire lifespan from before birth (prenatal) to death. Within developmental psychology are several different areas of study, including cognitive, social, behavioral, language, moral, and imaginative development. Anything you can study in psychology, you can study from a developmental perspective. One part of developmental psychology that crosses several of these areas is learning – a concept that seems simple at first but becomes more complex upon further examination. Learning is a life-span activity. We begin learning in the womb and continue learning, through the interaction with our environment, throughout our entire lives. There has been much said about the “nature vs. nurture” question: Which is a stronger influence –  nature through genetics and biology or nurture from our environment and upbringing? Developmentalists have come to the conclusion that this key debate is not a debate anymore; We don’t say “nature vs. nurture,” but instead, “nature AND nurture.” This is to say,  nature and nurture interact to determine how we become who we are. Genetics impact our environments and the environment impacts our genetics. This is just a sample of the wide range of questions that developmental psychologists attempt to answer.

The Social & Personality Domain

Psychologists study many concepts individually, but most concepts do not exist in isolation. Humans are deeply social creatures, so psychology also examines humans through groups and networks. The social and personality domain includes constructs such as emotions, culture, social interaction, and personality. Each of those four subjects branches out starting from the individual to the larger groups they belong to. For example, you may think of emotions as very personal and individual. Something happened and you felt sad. But your feeling sad has social implications, as it may have been an interaction with another person causing the sad emotion. And in turn, you may let that sadness affect your thoughts and behaviors, which often involves others. That singular emotion can have a ripple effect through a larger social network. Emotions can also be felt at a societal level, which eads us to the social phenomenon of culture. Culture has a strong impact on society and how people interact (or don’t interact) with each other. Lastly, the individuals forming a group or who are part of a given culture leads us to the study of personality, which has large implications on how people interact and behave. Personality, emotion, culture, and our interactions with others intertwine and play important roles in who we become.

The Mental & Physical Health Domain

As we have already stated, the mind is a complicated thing. While through decades of research and study, we have developed a significant understanding of the brain, there is still so much left to learn. The brain has great mechanisms that promote effective and efficient management of emotions and other sensory input. What happens when some of these mechanisms turn out to be not so efficient? As mental health awareness has developed, so have the diagnosis and treatment of psychological disorders. The DSM, or the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, serves as a guide for clinicians to diagnose and classify different mental health issues such as mood, personality, and neurodevelopmental disorders. The DSM defines the criteria one must meet (such as duration and severity) to warrant a diagnosis, but the exact symptoms and
etiology of one disorder typically vary from person to person. There is also variation in treatment options – a therapy that works for one individual may not have any effect on another. This goes back to the overarching idea in psychology that people are unique. While therapy and pharmacological treatment can provide support for living with mental health disorders, there are also steps we, as individuals, can take to improve overall well-being. For example, stress. Stress is an inevitable and often even helpful part of life. While stress can be overwhelming, there are ways to utilize the neuroplasticity of the brain to keep it manageable.

Applied Psychology

As you have seen, psychology is not just confined to the four walls of a classroom or a lab. Instead, psychology is a versatile field of study and can be applied in various contexts. Applied psychology is not a domain on its own. Rather, it is when psychologists take what they have discovered from their research and apply those findings to real world settings. These settings often relate to the “subfields” of our discipline.^[11] For example, the subfield of Industrial Organizational psychology, (I/O for short), is the application of psychological principles to corporations, businesses, and industry. I/O psychologists are interested in variables such as which factors support worker motivation and use what they learn to increase productivity in a workplace. They also study the psychological, biological, and cultural factors that contribute to burnout. One such researcher at George Mason University, Lauren Kuykendall focuses on employee well-being, burnout, and work-nonwork balance.^[12]

Applied psychology extends even beyond humans. One growing subfield, human factors psychology, looks at human-technology interaction. For example, the human factors psychologists at George Mason University (Fairfax, VA, USA), study how humans interact with the food-delivery robots on their campus.^[13] 

Taken by Sunnya

Applied developmental psychology focuses on taking what is learned about human growth and development and applying it to schools, programs, and other real-world settings. Psychology is a science, and like most sciences, it can be found everywhere when you know what to look for.

Where do you see psychology being applied in the real world or in your everyday experiences?

Going back to this chapter’s key integrative theme: Psychological, biological, social, and cultural factors influence behavior and mental processes. We have seen brief examples of how this is indeed true, and how these factors are present across domains. If we just examine psychology in siloed domains without understanding the interplay of concepts across themes, we lose sight of the larger psychological picture. And, unfortunately, this category breakdown can lead students to believe psychologists who study one domain hold competing perspectives with those studying others. In reality, a comprehensive view of how we became the person we are becoming today must draw from several domains. Often these domains overlap in subject, content, and theory. The very definition of psychology includes various domains and content areas: thinking (cognition), feeling (emotion, mental health), and behavior (personality, social, & developmental psychology). In this resource, just like in real life, these content areas are integrated as we dive into the overarching themes spanning psychology.

CH 2 VOCABULARY

• Academic discipline
• Acquisition
• Attention
• Behaviorism
• Central nervous system
• Cognitive flexibility
• Cognitive revolution
• Cultural psychology
• Domains
• DSM
• Executive functions
• Sigmund Freud
• Inhibition
• William James
• Learning
• Language processing
• Abraham Maslow
• Neural pathways
• Neurons
• Nurture and nature
• Psychoanalysis theory
• Carl Rogers
• B.F. Skinner
• Sociocultural framework
• Working memory