Cognition, Emotion and Motivation: Culture

Cognition, Emotion, And Motivation: Culture
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Cognition, Emotion, And Motivation: Culture
Introduction
Culture refers to the patterns of shared principles, norms, and morals which are particular to a group of people. Research has shown that the social ideas, customs, and behavior of a specific society influences how its members perceive and comprehend the world around them. Culture contributes to how we perceive our environment through social processes that undergird learning, partaking in daily activities, and material as well as emblematic artifacts that aid and extend thinking. Culture also influences emotion by shaping how members of a particular group or society should feel in various situations as well as how they should express their feelings. Emotions are cultural phenomena since people learn how to perceive, experience, and even display feelings in a cultural way. Moreover, culture influences motivation by shaping how members of a particular group or society perceive achievement and the needs that direct behavior toward achievement. Different cultures differ in how they shape, promote, and constrain the kinds of achievements that people will pursue as well as the wants or values driving those pursuits. This thesis will discuss the relationship between cognition, emotion, and motivation in the context of culture. It will also integrate personal factors, environmental influences, and sociocultural components relevant to the research topic.
How Culture Influences Cognition
Culture influences cognition by providing an all-encompassing framework that guides how members of a specific groups or society perceive, weigh, describe, and attend to events and objects tied to their selves and the external environment. Our understanding of our selves and the broader environment is founded on imperfect and biased processes including awareness, problem solving, attention, rationalizing, and memory. These cognitive processes guide the process of representing our selves and the world: people perceive, organize, and assess information about themselves and the environment around them using already existing schemas. Various studies have shown that people rarely experience themselves or the broader environment in a perfect or impartial way (Lee & Shin, 2021). Rather, they rely on preexisting representations that are susceptible to cultural influences. Culture has a conditioning effect on perception and cognition through norms, principles, needs, and values, which influence people’s fundamental sensory acuities.
Culture provides a set of theories about the self and external environment thereby influencing how people perceive or understand sensory inputs like shapes, colors, images, or sounds. Cultural differences in perception and cognition are most notable in the ways Westerners and Easterners interpret the self and broader environment. For instance, people in Western cultures are socialized to be assertive and independent while people in Eastern cultures are socialized to be empathetic and interdependent. Westerners tend to view the self as a self-governing, independent entity as opposed to Easterners who have a dominant inter-reliant construal of the self (Masuda et al., 2020). This difference in how the two cultures conceive the self is reflected in how people perceive and understand the world around them. For instance, Westerners focus largely on those personal characteristics and attributes that separate them from others. Traits or attributes outside the self are de-emphasized while self-related goals and needs are given more priority when compared the goals or needs of others.
Western culture focuses on the individual as a separate entity from the social context and as less related and more distinctive from others. On the other hand, Easterners focus on those traits and attributes that connect them to others. The self is conceived as part and parcel of the social context and more linked than dissimilar from others. As a result, the Eastern culture has socialized people to give importance to the impression given by their selves to the rest of society, including the feelings and responses of others. Although the degree to which an individual construe their self as independent or interdependent varies from person to person, the individual’s culture is largely responsible for the propensity to focus or not focus on the self in relation to others and the environment. For instance, Westerners are likely to perceive and understand uniqueness as the highest value on personal goals (Burkitt, 2021). Western culture’s preference for individuality over conformity has socialized people to strive for singularity in all aspects of their lives.
A Westerner will evaluate a product, service, or group affiliation based on how it serves their own needs rather than how it serves the cultural group to which they belong. This singular focus on the self as an autonomous and distinctive being undergirds all social connections including friendship, marriage, religious affiliation, and professional or political party. Westerners perceive these connections in terms of how well they meet their individual needs and will try to change or even terminate relationships that fail to serve their personal priorities (Chin et al., 2022). On the other hand, collectivist Eastern societies that place more emphasis on collective well-being than on individual needs have socialized people to evaluate their actions in terms of the priorities of their group. These societies give little importance to individuality or uniqueness and therefore people tend to focus on others’ wishes, welfare, image, and overall well-being. An individual’s distinctiveness is assessed in terms of the benefits and costs it brings to the group, resulting in behavior that is geared towards sustaining harmonious and communal relationships.
Unlike in Western cultures where individuals are socialized to think along the lines of autonomy and uniqueness, Eastern cultures emphasize holistic and contextual thinking. For instance, a Westerner experiencing conflict with an in-group member will strive to protect their individuality and autonomy as a separate entity from their social group. Conversely, an Easterner experiencing conflict with an in-group member will give up their individuality by prescribing to role expectations and acting deferentially to preserve “face” and group harmony (Masuda et al., 2020). On the whole, the divergence in Western and Eastern thinking with relation to the self, others, and the broader environment prove that cultural models govern the ways people understand experiences and guide how they behave in a broad array of life domains. Culture provides the basic schemas that compose the value systems of a particular group and, more importantly, the very thought processes by which individuals cognize the world around them.
How Culture Influences Emotion
Despite the conflicting explanations of human emotions, psychologists and cultural anthropologists agree that culture has a significant impact on how people perceive or express feelings. While there are universally recognized emotions (happiness, disgust, surprise, anger, fright, contempt, and sadness), how people perceive and express them differs across cultural groups (Tsai, 2019). For instance, there are variances in how each culture associates a particular facial expression with its universally recognized emotion. What may be interpreted as happiness in one culture may still be interpreted as happiness in another culture but to a lesser or higher degree, depending on how members of that group or society have been socialized. For instance, while smiling is universally accepted as an indication of happiness, Westerners smile more frequently than Easterners and also associate smiling with happiness to a higher degree than their counterparts.
Culture also influences emotion by providing a collection of culturally specific standards that guide the type and frequency of specific emotional displays. For instance, Westerners are encouraged to express negative emotions in both private and public spaces while Easterners have been socialized to suppress negative feelings in public settings but are allowed to express them in private. This difference in display rules relate to the cultural principles that guide how people understand themselves and the external environment. Culture not only influences how people express their emotions but also how they perceive them. For instance, different cultures rely on dissimilar non-verbal cues when interpreting other people’s display of feelings in social contexts (Chin et al., ...