Take an aspirin and call me in the morning? According to World Health Organization (WHO), health is “a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being, and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.” When you have such physical problems as listed below, what do you usually do? What will you do if you do not have access to your usual treatment?

Describe one alternative solution. In order to find an alternative solution, you can do research by using the internet or you can ask people, including those who have different cultural backgrounds from yours for their opinions. In that case indicate their original culture.

a) What do you usually do when you have: a headache a cold stomach ache toothache no appetite a sore throat high fever insomnia

b) Describe the alternative treatments you discovered and their origins.

c) Have you had any psychological stress, as listed below, in your life? What were some of the effective ways you used to deal with the stresses? If you haven’t had such problems, describe the ways you would likely deal with these and the reasons why. You lost your beloved pet.

You have a broken heart over a former intimate partner. You had a fight with your friend. You didn’t pass the exam in class. You had your purse/wallet stolen on the bus. The professor in your class told you to give a presentation next week. Your parents divorced. Needs to be 5-6 paragraphs readings to help a different cognition mentally and physically? The field of cognition and perception is concerned with some of the most basic and fundamental operations of the mind. Yet it is within this field that some of the clearest evidence for cultural variation has emerged. The most researched cultural distinction regarding cognition has been the contrast of East Asians and Westerners in their thinking styles. Westerners tend to reason in analytic ways; they view objects as static and separate from each other, and understand those objects on the basis of their internal properties and how they correspond to abstract rules and principles. In contrast, East Asians (and people from many other cultural traditions) tend to reason in holistic ways, understanding objects and events as being fundamentally connected with each other, bound to a background context, continually changing, and governed by harmonious relations. Much evidence has been amassed to support this distinction between Westerners reasoning analytically and East Asians reasoning holistically.

East Asians perform relatively better on tasks that involve detecting relations among events, whereas Westerners perform relatively better on tasks requiring separation of an object from its background. East Asians tend to see foreground objects as bound to their background context whereas Westerners focus on foreground objects and relatively ignore the background. This cultural difference appears to be driven by where people are looking, as East Asians are more likely to scan an entire scene whereas Westerners devote more of their visual attention to focal objects. These cultural differences in perceptual habits are also identifiable in aesthetic preferences. East Asian art tends to emphasize the context by consisting of relatively small figures and scenes with relatively high horizons in contrast to Western pictures where figures are relatively large and horizons are low. Just as normal psychological processes vary across cultures, so do abnormal ones. The extent of cultural shaping of psychological disorders is most evident in culture-bound disorders, which are disorders that are largely limited to certain cultures. Many of these disorders, such as koro, dhat, or amok, appear quite foreign to Westerners, and they do not fit into any of the more familiar diagnostic categories used by Western psychiatrists. Some universally identifiable psychopathologies, such as depression, social anxiety, suicide, and schizophrenia, also are presented in culturally variable ways. Most noteworthy are the findings that symptoms of depression are likely to be somatized within some cultures (e.g., China) and psychologized in others (e.g. North America). Social anxiety is also universally present; however, it is very common in East Asia—so common that it is viewed as more normative there than in the West.

When serious anxiety disorders present in Japan they are more likely to do so with the symptoms of taijinkyofushou, which includes a very different set of symptoms from those of social anxiety disorder. Suicides vary a great deal in their frequency across cultures and in the motivations leading to them. Schizophrenia perhaps is the most cross-culturally similar disorder; however, even here there is cultural variation in the subtypes of schizophrenia that are most common and in the course of the disease.