Cognitive psychologist Sabrina Golonka says that our theories of mind and cognition are culturally constructed, and, because cognitive psychology emerged in the West, limited by Western concepts:

If someone asked you to describe the psychological aspects of personhood, what would you say? Chances are, you’d describe things like thought, memory, problem-solving, reasoning, maybe emotion. In other words, you probably list the major headings of a cognitive psychology text-book. In cognitive psychology, we seem to take it for granted that these are, objectively, the primary components of “the mind” (even if you reject a mind/body dualism, you probably accept some notion that there are psychological processes similar to the ones listed above). I’ve posted previously about whether the distinction between cognitive and non-cognitive even makes sense. But, here, I want to think about the universality of the “mind” concept and its relationship to the modern view of cognition.

In fact, this conception of the mind is heavily influenced by a particular (Western) cultural background. Other cultures assign different characteristics and abilities to the psychological aspects of personhood.

Do not miss as well the 2010 essay by Ethan Watters about what he calls “The Americanization of Mental Illness.” Excerpt:

In any given era, those who minister to the mentally ill — doctors or shamans or priests — inadvertently help to select which symptoms will be recognized as legitimate. Because the troubled mind has been influenced by healers of diverse religious and scientific persuasions, the forms of madness from one place and time often look remarkably different from the forms of madness in another.

That is until recently.

For more than a generation now, we in the West have aggressively spread our modern knowledge of mental illness around the world. We have done this in the name of science, believing that our approaches reveal the biological basis of psychic suffering and dispel prescientific myths and harmful stigma. There is now good evidence to suggest that in the process of teaching the rest of the world to think like us, we’ve been exporting our Western “symptom repertoire” as well. That is, we’ve been changing not only the treatments but also the expression of mental illness in other cultures. Indeed, a handful of mental-health disorders — depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and anorexia among them — now appear to be spreading across cultures with the speed of contagious diseases. These symptom clusters are becoming the lingua franca of human suffering, replacing indigenous forms of mental illness.

It can be unnerving to confront that what we think of as fixed categories about personhood are not so fixed after all. But it’s true. Remember what the research psychologist Jonathan Haidt said in his Edge lecture? This bit summarizing a recent scientific article?:

So, the first article is called “The Weirdest People in the World,” by Joe Henrich, Steve Heine and Ara Norenzayan, and it was published last month in BBS. And the authors begin by noting that psychology as a discipline is an outlier in being the most American of all the scientific fields. Seventy percent of all citations in major psych journals refer to articles published by Americans. In chemistry, by contrast, the figure is just 37 percent. This is a serious problem, because psychology varies across cultures, and chemistry doesn’t.

So, in the article, they start by reviewing all the studies they can find that contrast people in industrial societies with small-scale societies. And they show that industrialized people are different, even at some fairly low-level perceptual processing, spatial cognition. Industrialized societies think differently.

The next contrast is Western versus non-Western, within large-scale societies. And there, too, they find that Westerners are different from non-Westerners, in particular on some issues that are relevant for moral psychology, such as individualism and the sense of self.

Their third contrast is America versus the rest of the West. And there, too, Americans are the outliers, the most individualistic, the most analytical in their thinking styles.

And the final contrast is, within the United States, they compare highly educated Americans to those who are not. Same pattern.

All four comparisons point in the same direction, and lead them to the same conclusion, which I’ve put here on your handout. I’ll just read it. “Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic societies.”  The acronym there being WEIRD. “Our findings suggest that members of WEIRD societies are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans. Overall, these empirical patterns suggest that we need to be less cavalier in addressing questions of human nature, on the basis of data drawn from this particularly thin and rather unusual slice of humanity.”

As I read through the article, in terms of summarizing the content, in what way are WEIRD people different, my summary is this: The WEIRDer you are, the more you perceive a world full of separate objects, rather than relationships, and the more you use an analytical thinking style, focusing on categories and laws, rather than a holistic style, focusing on patterns and contexts.

In other words, we have constructed models of normality in the West, assuming that what is normal for us is universally true. But this is not the case at all. In fact, in terms of mind, Westerners — especially educated Westerners — are among the most unrepresentative people in the world.

More from Sabrina Golonka:

Interestingly, Russia, which kind of sits between East and West uses “dusa” as the counterpart to the psychological part of the person. “Dusa” is often translated as “soul”, but also sometimes as “heart” or “mind.” “Dusa” is associated with feelings, morality, and spirituality. The “dusa” is responsible for the ability to connect with other people. This meaning seems to lie somewhat more with the Eastern conception than with the highly cognitive concept of “mind.”

This is not surprising, given Russian Orthodoxy and the concept of nous (pron. “noose”), which is central to Orthodox anthropology. I ought to check this with my books (which are by now all, every last one, packed away in sealed boxes), but I remember from my Orthodox catechism that in the Eastern fathers, the nous is the term used for the intuitive aspect of the person — this, as distinct from the mind, which is the rational aspect. It is the nous that allows us to communicate with God. The Fall darkened the nous; our salvation depends on enlightening and healing the nous, restoring the soul’s communion with God. The heart is the seat of the nous.

Interestingly, Traditional Chinese Medicine also distinguishes between the mind and the heart A couple of years ago, I gave a paper at a Templeton conference in Oxford, comparing Taoist ideas about the body with the Orthodox conception. There’s a lot of overlap — and I blogged about this fairly extensively at Beliefnet, but all those posts seem to have disappeared  there. Anyway, the key point is that in both Orthodox Christianity and in Taoism (which informs TCM), there is a lot more going on in the heart than just blood pumping. It has something to do with consciousness, or at least part of our consciousness. The heart is not just a metaphor, either, but in some sense part of who we are. This passage from an Orthodox monk explains this more clearly, from an Orthodox point of view. As far as I know, there is no medical evidence to back this understanding up.

But take a look at Joel Garreau’s story, which first appeared in the Washington Post, about how a psychiatrist’s emotions and intuition changed profoundly after he received an artificial heart. Especially this:

Much of the original artificial-heart work was driven by the technological optimism born of the space program. Some of the current work is driven by the idea that brains and bodies are separate entities.

But in light of Houghton and other victims of psychological and cognitive trauma after intervention in their bodies, some scientists fear we are tampering not with a bodily machine but with the human spirit.

“We’ve got to understand the organs and systems coming into our lives. We haven’t paid a lot of attention to the psychological or emotional aspects of thinking of ourselves as bodies,” says [Penn bioethicist Arthur] Caplan.

“People interested in eternal life through body regeneration or organ substitutions” consider humans to be “a brain on top of a complicated bag of water,” he says. “Ship that brain elsewhere, and it would still be you. Not true, exactly. Not that we couldn’t adjust or adapt. But in some subtle ways, our sense of self — who we are — is shaped by our carcasses. Shaped by the containers we drag around.”

Do Eastern cultures — Asian and Orthodox Christian — understand something about the connection between the heart and the brain that we in the West do not? Interesting to think about.