28th International Congress of Psychology August 8 ... - U-netSURF

Olwen Bedford, National Taiwan University, Dept. of Psychology, Taiwan, China
Survey and interview data from 127 expatriate Westerners and 147 Taiwanese in Taiwan were
analyzed to explore cultural differences in thinking on social responsibility and SARS. Despite
similarity in age, educational background, experience with quarantine, and actions taken,
Taiwanese and Westerners had clearly different ideas about the concept of social responsibility.
Westerners emphasized individuals’ responsibility to society and advocated moral education to
increase quarantine compliance; Taiwanese stressed the government’s responsibility to the
individual, and urged more care and support from the government to increase compliance.
Inadequacy of the current Individualism-Collectivism paradigm and implications for related policy
in Taiwan are discussed.
4128.8 Folk psychotherapy in Japan, Ratnin Dewaraja, Komazawa University, Tokyo, Japan
The availability of modern psychotherapy is limited in Japan, and moreover, its consumption is
stigmatized. It was hypothesized that people supplement the scarcity of professional
psychotherapy by seeking the advise of traditional healers, such as shaman and fortune-tellers,
who provide psychotherapy aimed at addressing the secular, everyday-problems of modern life,
faced by their clients; but provided within the context of the spiritual healing philosophy of the
practitioner. This study focused on a fortune-teller in Japan and analyzed the complaints of his
clients. The results of this investigation validated our hypothesis and suggested that fortune-tellers
in Japan function as informal psychotherapists.
4129 ORAL
Culture and psychology
Chair: Abdolhossein Abdollahi, Iran
4129.2 Effects of pursuing useless information on decision making across cultures,
Abdolhossein Abdollahi, Zarand Islamic Azad University, Iran
To investigate the effects of useless information on decision making across three cultures
(American, Iranian, and Japanese), 143 participants responded to two surveys. Half of the
participants received a Simple version and the other half, an Uncertain version. In the Simple
version, no "useless" information was provided, but in the Uncertain version participants received
information that was nonistrumental for the task of decision making. Results revealed that
participants in all three cultures are susceptible to pursuing useless information under uncertainty
conditions. Also, participants from the American culture showed a higher rate of pursuing the
useless information than the other two groups.
4129.3 Vygotsky’s mediational psychology: New conceptualization of culture, signification and
metaphor, Habibollah Ghassemzadeh, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Iran
The idea of mediation of elementary mental functions by "psychological tools" or "signs" was
introduced and formulated by Vygotsky. The main purpose of this paper is to review some of the
important aspects of mediational/semiotic psychology of Vygotsky as they relate to the concepts of
signalling, signification and culture. It has been suggested that culture as a whole complex
1036