Walter J. Lonner - Böcker

This Element describes noteworthy developments in cross-cultural psychology of the past half century. It stresses the author's involvement with the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology and the International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology. It presents events in a decade-by-decade format, allowing brief discussion of high points in each decade, such as significant conferences and books, and commentaries on selected scholars. Topics include summaries of IACCP conferences, Online Readings in Psychology and Culture, IACCP Archives, and assessment of introductory psychology texts and their cultural content. Key aspects of culture-centered methodology in psychology and the teaching of culture-oriented psychology conclude the presentation.

Offering a primary focus on North American cultural and ethnic diversity while addressing global questions and issues, Counseling Across Cultures, Seventh Edition draws on the expertise of 48 invited contributors to examine the cultural context of accurate assessment and appropriate interventions in counseling diverse clients. The book’s chapters highlight work with African Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos/as, American Indians, refugees, individuals in marginalized situations, international students, those with widely varying religious beliefs, and many others. Edited by pioneers in multicultural counseling, this volume articulates the positive contributions that can be achieved when multicultural awareness is incorporated into the training of counselors.

 

This book is a landmark in contemporary cultural psychology. Ernest Boesch’s synthesis of ideas is the first comprehensive theory of culture in psychology since Wilhelm Wundt’s Völkerpsychologie of the first decades of the twentieth century. Cultural psychology of today is an attempt to advance the program of research that was charted out by Wundt—yet at times we are carefully avoiding direct recognition of such continuity. While Wundt’s experimental psychology has been hailed as the root for contemporary scientific psychology, the other side of his contribution— ethnographic analysis of folk traditions and higher psychological functions— has been largely discredited as something disconnected from the scientific realm. As an example of “soft” science—lacking the “hardness” of experimentation—it has been considered to be an esoteric hobby of the founding father of contemporary psychology. Of course that focus is profoundly wrong—the opposition “soft” versus “hard” just does not fit as a metalevel organizer of any science. Yet the rhetoric discounting the descriptive side of Wundt’s psychology is merely an act of social guidance of what psychologists do—not a way of creating knowledge.