About

Callista Lee is a professor of psychology at Fullerton Community College in southern California. She has an M.S. in Community-Clinical Psychology from California State University Long Beach and has been teaching for over twenty years. Although she is mostly known for teaching Human Sexuality, she also teaches Introduction to the Human Services and Cross-Cultural Psychology.

From the sabbatical proposal —

As populations have become increasingly culturally mixed within countries, and countries have become increasingly interdependent, the emerging twin fields of cross cultural and multicultural psychology have gained more and more importance in the field. In psychology, multiculturalism has been referred to by some as the “fourth force” following psychoanalysis, behaviorism, and humanism. Cross cultural psychology focuses on human universals across cultures revisiting the old philosophical question: “What is human nature?”  And so similarities and differences between cultures are studied, using mostly qualitative methods of psychological inquiry.  Multicultural psychology focuses on what happens when people of different cultures live and work together in one community and/or when a single person embodies more than one culture. Though these fields cover many topics, the topics my sabbatical will emphasize include: worldview, the cultural unconscious, stereotyping, prejudice, discrimination, racism, cultural identity development, cultural considerations in both physical and mental health ailments and care, and ways to build multicultural competence.

You may be somewhat familiar with the concept of the individual unconscious popularized by Sigmund Freud (1856 – 1939). His follower, Carl Jung (1875 – 1961), suggested that there was also a collective unconscious of archetypal concepts and ideas shared by peoples across the world. It is theorized that both the individual and collective unconscious guide behavior in the individual. This theory presumes a cross cultural universal human mind. According to these theories, people aren’t always consciously aware of why they do the things they do because their motives are – at least in part – hidden at the unconscious level.  An example comes from a famous social psychology experiment in which psychologists asked a focus group to explain why they prefer one product over another. Participants came up with plausible rationales for their attraction or repulsion for the product but not one gave the real reason (they tended to choose whatever product was placed on the left.)

Social, clinical, and biological psychologists are well aware that human psychology often is affected by unconscious motives, and a third layer of unconscious has been suggested by the French (now French-American) psychologist Clotaire Rapaille: the cultural unconscious.  He argues quite convincingly in his book, The Culture Code: An ingenious way to understand why people around the world live and buy as they do (2006), that there is a French mind, an English mind, a Kurdish mind, an American mind, etc. This cultural unconscious is something that develops early in life when most of our thinking is at a highly emotional level.

While most of what I do during this sabbatical will apply to my Cross-Cultural Psychology course, I will also be able to apply it to every other course I teach. Psychologists now recognize the importance of understanding the effects of culture on one’s clients, students, or research participants and increasingly, issues of culture and ethnicity are making their way into textbooks throughout the many topical areas within psychology.

Encouragement to develop one’s “multicultural competence” is growing quickly within the field of psychology as well as other fields where people must effectively interact with other people. In my Cross-Cultural Psychology course, we discuss the effects of culture on one’s perceptions of self, others, and on other cultures. Most textbooks, though, focus on current minority groups within the United States, including recent immigrants. Very little is said about those who immigrated prior to the 1930’s. Students whose families long ago emigrated here from Europe may not think of themselves in terms of their “cultural identity.”

For White (European) Americans living their entire life as a member of the dominant culture here in North America, it is often difficult to see the forest for the trees when it comes to noting the effects of one’s own culture on one’s identity development, perceptions, expectations, etc. All of that is just viewed as “normal.”  To begin one’s study of other cultures from an ethnocentric point of view is to perceive others, as, well…OTHERS. THEY.  DIFFERENT. This too often becomes “strange, oppressed, backward, immoral, and/or inscrutable”. And so an important part of truly understanding cross cultural and multicultural psychology – and an important part of building one’s multicultural competence – is taking a long look at one’s own culture.