Psychosocial aspects of Korean reunification: Explicit and implicit national attitudes and identity of South Koreans and North Korean defectors.

Abstract

Two studies investigated the explicit and implicit attitudes toward, and identification with, South and North Korea by a sample of South Koreans and North Koreans who voluntarily defected to the South. North Korean defectors showed (a) more positive evaluations of South Korea on explicit self-report measures, but more favorable evaluations of the North on an implicit measure, and (b) on average, North-South neutral identity on an explicit measure, but stronger self-association with the North on an implicit measure. In contrast, South Koreans indicated consistently positive attitudes toward, and identification with, the South on both explicit and implicit measures. Implications of these findings for Korean unification are discussed. Korean unification could be something like the catastrophic crack of the earth's two plates. It could be a division and disruption rather than a union. … it could be a pain where it pretends to be a joy, a division rather than a unity.Y.-G. KimFor about half a century, "Our Wish, Unification of Korea" has consistently ranked as the favorite song of both South and North Koreans alike, regardless of age and

Implicit Acculturation and the Academic Adjustment of Chinese Student Sojourners in Australia

“…To our knowledge, only two studies have employed implicit methods to measure processes related to acculturation. The first of these studies explored implicit cultural identification with South and North Korea in a sample of North Koreans who had defected to South Korea (Kim & Oh, ). The new citizens of South Korea (i.e., refugees from North Korea) responded to explicit and implicit measures of North–South Korean identity.…”

“…The first study aimed to extend the preliminary work of Kim and colleagues (Kim et al, ; Kim & Oh, ) by establishing the GNAT as a sound measure of implicit cultural identification, which can assess implicit identification in a manner that is suitable for application to Berry's acculturation attitudes framework. The GNAT is a speeded categorization task that measures the accuracy of implicit associations between target categories.…”

“…Specifically, the data supplied by the 36 Chinese and 38 Australian participants in Study 1 were re‐used in some analyses in Study 2 to allow a comparison between the responses of the potentially acculturating student sojourner group and the responses of student groups in both the home and host cultures. Based on our theorising of acculturation processes, and informed by the previous research of Kim and her colleagues (Kim et al, ; Kim & Oh, ), we formulated the following hypotheses:

H1—Implicit acculturation attitude hypotheses: We predicted implicit separation attitudes, which would be evidenced by the sample remaining implicitly non‐identified with Australia while retaining their implicit cultural‐identification with China. This hypothesis was based on: (a) knowledge that the intention to return to the home culture removes any motivation to move toward an implicit identification with the host culture or to move away from implicit identification with the home culture, and (b) even if the sample is acculturating, the length of a student sojourn is unlikely to be long enough for implicit cultural identification with the host country to occur, even if it has occurred at the explicit level (Bargh, 1999).

H2—Acculturation‐relevant factors hypotheses: We hypothesised that acculturation (operationalised as increasing identification with the host culture) would be associated with positive academic outcomes, but also that engaging in the contact necessary to induce acculturation would be associated with higher levels of acculturation stress and lower levels of life satisfaction.

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Career Development of Young Adult North Korean Defectors in South Korea

“…This study not only contributes to providing a broadened understanding of a new generation of NKDs, but it also offers ways to overcome prevailing negative perspectives about NKDs in the South. We should remember that NKMs are not only the emerging population group in South Korean society, but they are also a promising generation with the possibility to play a leading role in achieving future reunification (D. Kim & Oh, 2001; A.…”

After the South and North Korea Summit: Malleability of Explicit and Implicit National Attitudes of South Koreans.

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Kim and Oh (2001) reported the existence of implicit (nonconscious) prejudicial attitudes toward South and North Korea by South Koreans and by North Koreans who voluntarily defected to South Korea, although the two groups showed no difference in explicit (conscious) forms of prejudice. This study followed up on the explicit and implicit attitudes of South Koreans initially reported in 1998, by assessing the attitudes shortly after the North and South Korea Summit held in June 2000, as well as 2 years later (2002).

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