Psychological and cognitive anthropology Studies of emotional development Cognitive development Cultural factors in variation of psychological factors The cross cultural study of mental illness Piaget s studies Sensorimotor 0 2 years Nonverbal learning through personal exploration and experience with concrete objects Preoperational 2 7 years Children acquire vocabulary and tag objects with words Concrete operational 7 12 years Children classify objects by similarities and differences in qualities They learn to use multiple dimensions simultaneously in making classifications These include length number weight area volume Formal operational scientific 12 adult Formal logic use of syllogisms deductive reasoning hare tortoise as fast slow During the concrete operational stage children acquire concepts like conservation and reversibility while during the formal operational stage the ability to think in hypothetical terms is developed Are these stages universal Primitive means technology Most work has been on the shift from operational to abstract reasoning stage Are preindustrial people preoperational Consider the two week hunting treks of the Yanomamo the trans Pacific canoe trips of the people of Yap the eight section kinships system of Australian peoples the distribution of meat among the Kung and so on No culture free tests The problem may be the supposedly culture free tests and schooling as training for certain kinds of tests Marc Irwin studied rice farmers in Liberia and compared them to U S undergraduates Used rice bowls and geometric cards for the two groups Abstract thinking was at the same level in both groups The instrument effect The Porteus Maze and Australian aborigines 1917 There are hundreds of studies of Aborigine cognition The false debate over culture vs nature in explaining the results The instrument effect beakers and triangles are not part of everyone s experience The conservation principle Douglas Price Williams used familiar materials and found no differences in the concrete operational stage between Tiv children in West Africa and European children in terms of conservation of earth nuts number Literacy and cognition Literacy is literacy a factor in cognition But Vai and Cree readers who have their own scripts were more affected by schooling than by literacy on cognitive tests Field independence People who rely on hunting develop field independence Embedded Figures Test Two examples Mexico and Greece Child rearing practices Breast feeding In 70 of societies children are weaned after two years Children may be fed 20 40 times per day Almost all American women stop by 10 months Holding and touching In H G societies children are held up to 50 of the day In both the U S and Japan children are touched from 12 20 of the time that they are awake In the U S babies are usually held than 10 of the day and spend a lot of time alone in cribs The Logoli of Kenya Lee and Ruth Munroe found infants held more by their mothers become more trusting by age 5 the number of different holders adds more to trust in toddlers than time held by mothers Response to crying ite pinai ite ponai in traditional Greek if a child is crying it s either hurting or hungry In many societies like the Efe of Congo a 3 month old gets a response within 10 sec of crying 75 of the time In U S we ignore crying 45 of the time Infant mortality 1 in industrialized societies vs up to 35 in nonindustrialized societies Collective vs individualistic values Agricultural and herding societies stress obedience Hunting and gathering societies stress self reliance and individuality We are foragers in the U S The correlation is inexact and the mechanism of cause remains a subject of wide interest and study Culturally specific mental illnesses Windigo psychosis among Ojibwa Cree men of these societies are said to be possessed by cannibal giant wiitiko Pibloktoq Amok Eskimo adults of Greenland Women strip naked and wander across ice until they collapse Malaya Indonesia New Guinea Depression followed by brooding and withdrawal and then a wild berserk frenzy of destruction Are these illnesses patterned Are they expressions of the same mental illnesses Marano s explanation of windigo psychosis Under conditions of stress the Ojibwa and Cree triaged their population and increased the chance for survival of all There is never documentation of the behavior of the accused But all accused were sickly senile non Ojibwa Emic vs etic explanations The etic requires positing a universal fear stimulated by specific conditions The fear of being eaten was concocted as a way to overcome the fear of killing Manifestation of mental illness in different societies N Schiz M D Other Hutterites 57 17 74 9 Taiwan 76 57 17 26 N Sweden 107 87 2 11 Ttennessee 156 27 26 47 Baltimore 367 43 11 46 Edgerton s study mental illness in Africa Sebei of Uganda Pokot of NW Kenya Kamba of SC Kenya Hehe of Tanzania Kichwaa Swahili for severe mental illness Free list of traits of kichwaa Goes naked Sleeps or hides in the bush Shaves head and bites self Eats and smears dirt and or feces Runs wildly Destroys property Wanders aimlessly Five key traits Five traits accounted for about 60 of all traits listed The Africans in these four societies said Edgerton do not regard a single behavior as psychotic which could not be so regarded in the West Schizophrenia is biochemically based but it is expressed differently across cultures Hallucinations Hallucinations were almost never listed 1 by Edgerton s informants Hallucinations about being controlled by robots emerged after a 1921 play by Karel Capek Schizophrenics only began hallucinating about being controlled by electric rays at the beginning of the 20th century Schizophrenics in the U S tend to have visual while schizophrenics in India tend to have more olfactory hallucinations Rosenhan s study of labeling 3 female and 5 male pseudopatients 7 of 8 admitted to a total of 12 hospitals One was diagnosed as manic depressive All others diagnosed as schizophrenic Released between 7 52 days later with diagnosis schizophrenia in remission or asymptomatic or improved note taking and oral acquisitive behavior One patient saw through it and accused the researcher of being a journalist None of the staff saw through it Spitzer s critique Was it ethical to dupe the hospital workers If people come to an emergency room with intense stomach pains wouldn t they be diagnosed as suffering from gastritis Eventually the same duped