Previous studies suggest that people from the Western hemisphere tend to explain others’ behavior based on a person’s traits and dispositions, while participants from non-Western cultural settings more likely refer to situational factors. From a developmental perspective, it has been suggested that culture-specific modes of explaining behavior gradually emerge during late childhood and adolescence. The present study explored whether traces of a corresponding culture-specific development can be found at earlier ages when using simplified assessments. In total, 438 children between 4 and 9 years old from Münster (urban Germany), Kyoto (urban Japan), and Cotacachi (rural Ecuador), were asked to explain positive and deviant behaviors of children depicted in simple picture-based vignettes. While more internal attributions were given in Münster than in Kyoto and Cotacachi children at 4 to 5 years old, these cultural differences disappeared as internal attributions significantly increased with age in Kyoto and Cotacachi but not Münster children. Analyzing children’s explanations on a level of subcategories revealed more subtle cultural specificities. For example, when giving internal explanations, Cotacachi children focused on stable traits, while Münster children emphasized individual desires and Kyoto children highlighted more volatile aspects. Cross-cultural differences in children’s social explanations could partially be explained by mothers’ preference for autonomy-related socialization goals. Taken together, this study provides evidence for an earlier onset of internal explanations when they are culturally accentuated and further calls for a more nuanced approach to capture culture-specific meaning systems reflected in everyday social explanations.
Previous cross‐cultural research has described two different attention styles: a holistic style, characterized by context‐sensitive processing, generally associated with interdependent cultural contexts, and an analytic style, a higher focus on salient objects, generally found in independent cultural contexts. Though a general assumption in the field is that attention styles are gradually socialized in culture‐specific interactions in childhood, empirical evidence for the proximal mechanisms underlying this development is scarce. This study aimed to document the emergence of cross‐cultural differences in attention styles in three cultural contexts differing in social orientations, namely in urban middle‐class families from Münster, Germany (i.e., more independent context), and Kyoto, Japan, and Indigenous‐heritage families from Cotacachi, Ecuador (i.e., more interdependent contexts). Furthermore, to test the assumption that caregivers’ attention guidance is one of the forces driving differential development, we investigated how caregivers guide children's attention. In total, 270 children between 4 and 9 years of age and their mothers participated in three tasks: an eye‐tracking task, a picture description task and a forced‐choice recognition task. Results indicate a mixed pattern of findings: While some tasks revealed the expected cultural differences, namely a higher object focus in Münster compared to Kyoto and Cotacachi, others did not. Regarding caregivers’ attention guidance, we found that mothers in Münster more strongly emphasized the focal object than mothers in Kyoto and Cotacachi. The results are discussed in terms of culture‐specific developmental trajectories and the generalizability of attentional processes across tasks and cultural contexts.Research Highlights We investigated visual attention styles in 4‐ to 9‐year‐old children and their mothers from urban Germany, urban Japan, and rural Ecuador in three different tasks. Special emphasis lied on mothers’ verbal attention guidance toward their children as a proximal mechanism underlying the emergence of culture‐specific attention styles. Mothers from urban Germany guided their children's attention in more analytic ways than mothers from urban Japan and rural Ecuador. The relevance of verbal attention guidance in the development of culture‐specific attention styles has been demonstrated beyond the East‐West dichotomy.
Accumulating evidence suggests that ethnotheories about ideal states of infant affect and activity vary across cultures in important ways. However, most previous studies have not directly identified such ethnotheories but rather inferred them from observational studies on mother-infant interaction. To fill this research gap, we interviewed mothers from two cultural milieus—mothers from Münster (urban Germany) and mothers who identify themselves as Kichwas (rural Ecuador), as these contexts presumably offer different construals of the self—to determine their ideal states of infant affect and activity and their self-reported co-regulation tendencies. The interview was based on short video clips of a German and an Ecuadorian infant displaying different combinations of affect (neutral, low-arousal positive or high-arousal positive affect) and activity (low or high). As expected, mothers in Münster preferred higher levels of positive affect than Kichwa mothers. Regarding co-regulation tendencies, we found cultural similarities and differences: Across samples, mothers tended to stimulate affect, and activity, especially when infants were neutral or inactive, but differed in their modality of co-regulation. More specifically, Münster mothers advocated more distal co-regulation modalities than did the Kichwa mothers. Taken together, the present study is the first to provide explicit evidence that maternal ethnotheories about infants’ ideal affect vary across cultures. The cross-cultural differences in ideal affect were not accompanied by differences in self-reported co-regulation of affect, suggesting an indirect link between ideals and (self-reported) parenting behavior.
Previous studies based on non-WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) samples provide initial evidence that the still-face effect is universal. Based on the assumption that – independent of their cultural niches – infants share some fundamental expectations of social interactions, we put forth the assumption that a universal response exists for when a social interaction is interrupted. At the same time, we hypothesized that the size of the effect depends on the typicality of the interaction that precedes the adult partners’ interruption. To test these hypotheses, we conducted the Still-Face Paradigm (SFP) with infants (3- and 4.5-month-olds) from two cultural milieus, namely Münster (urban Germany) and the Kichwa ethnic group from the northern Andes region (rural Ecuador), as these contexts presumably offer different ways of construing the self that are associated with different parenting styles, namely distal and proximal parenting. Furthermore, we developed a paradigm that comes much closer to the average expected environment of Kichwa infants, the “No-Touch Paradigm” (NTP). Overall, the results support our initial hypothesis that the still-face effect is universal. Moreover, infants from both cultural milieus responded to the no-touch condition with a change in negative affect. At the same time, some of the infants’ responses were accentuated in a culture-specific way: Kichwa infants had a stronger response to an interruption of proximal interaction patterns during the NTP. While our findings underline infants’ universal predisposition for face-to-face interaction, they also suggest that cultural differences in internalized interactions do influence infant behavior and experience and, in turn, development.
El presente trabajo tiene como objetivo plantear un campo de discusión acerca del quehacer de la educación superior en la gestión del conocimiento, cuando esta se ejerce en territorios de diversidad cultural, propios de la región latinoamericana y especialmente en Ecuador. Su importancia radica en la pertinencia de efectuar una gestión del conocimiento desde la academia en sectores territoriales interculturales, con fines de desarrollo local y regional. La metodología utilizada fue la revisión documental de trabajos de investigación realizados en el cantón Otavalo, provincia de Imbabura, tomando como categorías de análisis los principios de interculturalidad planteados en los referentes teóricos. Los resultados muestran una deficiencia conceptual y metodológica en la aplicación de la gestión del conocimiento desde el paradigma de las Epistemologías del Sur. A partir de estos resultados, se plantea la discusión sobre la acción intervencionista en las comunidades indígenas otavaleñas según la perspectiva intercultural. Las conclusiones afianzan la necesidad de la aplicación de las Epistemologías del Sur como paradigma apropiado para la intervención en las comunidades indígenas del país, con el fin de lograr una gestión del conocimiento que sea coherente con el respeto a la diversidad cultural y a las necesidades reales de desarrollo de los pueblos indígenas.
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