Posted by Sigismund on March 23, 2010, at 0:24:00
In reply to Re: Are you bitter? You may be mentally ill! » Sigismund, posted by floatingbridge on March 22, 2010, at 23:52:49
Regarding cultural hegemony (or whatever people call it these days) I thought you might like this.
>Responding to a sentence completion item that began "The people I like best are......." the US children usually mentioned friends, while Vietnamese mentioned family members. To the stem "I like my mother, but...." the US children tended to add some negative action by the mother ("sometimes she gets angry with me"). A fourth of Americans even mentioned negative feelings toward the mother. Only 7% of the Vietnamese mentioned any negative action by the mother and none expressed any negative feeling toward her. Over half the Vietnamese mentioned an obligation to do something for the mother. The sense of 'on' (moral debt) among 9, 10 and 11 year-old children living in the Mekong delta was revealed by lines like this: "I love my mother very much but I am still young and I cannot pay my debt to her".
>In the items intended to elicit fears, US children expressed "an externalised fear, emphasising animals and the dark." But Vietnamese children "seemed to be emphasising more internalised sorts of fears. They emphasised fears of personal inadequacy, failure in parental-familial relationships or some violation of sociocultural mores." And whereas US children indicated that their fears led them to "do something bad or undesirable", "most Vietnamese children indicated that their fear led them to perform some duty".
"Understanding Vietnam", p297
poster:Sigismund
thread:940161
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20100303/msgs/940501.html