Culture and Self-Expression

“Culture and Self-Expression,” written by Heejung S. Kim is how speech and self-expression are correlated and how they are expressed differently through distinct two cultural contexts. Kim’s main concern is related to, in the “more collectivistic cultural contexts” such as in the East Asian society, how speech and self-expression are not considered to be important to the same degree as in the U.S. Kim explains that it is because these East Asian cultures more value the thoughtful and self-disciplined silence. In other words, what the writer wants to tell the readers is that these different cultural assumptions affect how people express their thoughts and feelings, and then, how ways of expression influence both psychological and biological results. To further explain this, the article focuses on two things which are “the influence of speech on thought and the use and effects of social support.” Two studies are conducted on two different cultural groups of participants to discover the influence of speech on thought. The first study, which examined cultural influences on cognitive problem solving, instructed the participants to solve problems from the Raven’s Progressive Matrices. The outcome of the study reveals that the speech works as a primary means to express and clarify one’s thoughts in the Western cultural context while it works as a significant distraction to thinking in the Asian cultural context. The second study is conducted using the participant’s saliva examples for cortisol analysis along with the first study. It turned out that remarkably higher cortisol levels, indicating a measure of biological stress responding to the task, were shown for Asian American participants than European American participants. Then the participants did surveys about how they had coped with recently experienced stressors. As a result, Asian Americans/Asians answered that they were less likely to seek social support for coping with stress than European Americans were because they concern that seeking social support would cause them to interrupt group harmony, cause them to be embarrassed, and receive criticism from others. As a conclusion, the writer warns that “high levels of stress and other problems may arise when institutional practices expect a particular cultural meaning of speech from people who do not share the same cultural meaning” since they are based on Western cultural assumptions in terms of education and health practices and the society would only favor the cultural majority.

Do you believe that the institutional practices, which expect a particular meaning of speech from people who do not share the same cultural meaning, that are based on Western cultural assumptions in terms of education and health practices would be solved somehow not to only favor the cultural majority in the United States? Then, which cultural context do you think should try to develop their cultural practices?