Culture, personality, and psychopathology

Abstract

Culture needs to be made more central to the understanding of personality and psychopathology. New anthropological views describe cultural influences on personality and psychopathology by focusing on the effect of social change in local contexts on sociosomatic and sociopsychological processes. This view discloses the cultural biases built into dominant North American professional models of diagnosis and contrasts with past uses of culture in cross-cultural research. Examples from Chinese and Puerto Rican societies illustrate how indigenous interpersonal models of personality and psychopathology that focus on social processes can augment the cross-cultural validity of clinical formulations.