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Kia ora
Welcome to the August edition of the CACR Connection.
We hope you'll enjoy reading our latest news stories.:
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Professor Ronald Fischer’s public lecture
Humans have been exceptionally successful in colonising the most remote corners of our planet. Key to our success has been our ability to use culture to adapt to often hostile and challenging environments. But how have our minds enabled us to develop such fascinating diversity in our cultures, and how has this cultural diversity influenced how we think, feel and behave?
On Tuesday 14th August at 6pm CACR’s Co-Director, Professor Ronald Fischer, gave his inaugural professorial public lecture titled, ‘From minds to culture, and back again’. The lecture explored some of the reasons why, despite our shared identity as Homo sapiens, our cultures value different things, work together in different ways and have different ideas about happiness.
Here's a link to the Newsroom article on the lecture, click here. And to listen to the complete lecture, click here.
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Johannes Karl and Jason Lescelius both submitted their Masters’ thesis at the end of February this year, and both passed with flying colours! Johannes immediately began a PhD with Prof Ronald Fischer supervising, so we will continue to see a lot of him over the next few years. And Jason will start work with the Ministry of Justice in the role of Policy Advisor just as soon as he returns from a well-earned break away visiting family in the USA.
Reneeta’s primary supervisor was Prof Ronald Fischer and her secondary supervisor was Prof Joseph Bulbulia. Her thesis is titled ‘Aligning Bodies and Minds: New Insights about Synchrony’s Effects on Creative Thinking, Cohesion and Positive Affect’. In addition to Reneeta's ongoing work as a trainer for intercultural workshops, she has been awarded a contract with The Open Polytechnic as a Subject Matter Expert working with them to create an online intercultural competency development programme that is intended for use in every Government Department in New Zealand! Well done Reneeta!
Reneeta Mogan successfully defended her PhD thesis with only minor corrections required.
We are immensely proud of them, and wish them well in all their future endeavours.
The photos show Reneeta above, with Johannes on the left and Jason on the right below.
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The CACR always welcomes any opportunity to apply our research to real world environments and to create bespoke training programmes in intercultural relations. In this capacity Pharmac contracted the Centre to create a 1-day workshop on unconscious bias which was very well received by Pharmac employees in early July. The creation and facilitation of the workshop was a joint venture between Prof Colleen Ward from the CACR and Infer Consulting whose Co-Founder, Dr Jaimee Stuart, is a CACR alumna and Adjunct Research Fellow.
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Global-MINDS
Global-MINDS is the European Master in the Psychology of Global Mobility, Inclusion and Diversity in Society and is funded by the Earasmus-Mundus Joint Master Degree funding.
It is a comprehensive 2-year study programme focusing on insights into contemporary social and societal issues from Social and Cultural Psychology. Universities from five countries jointly deliver the Global-MINDS programme in English: ISCTE-Instituto Universitário de Lisboa, University of Limerick, Koc University (Istanbul, Turkey), University of Oslo, and University of Social Sciences and Humanities (Warsaw, Poland).
CACR Founding Director Prof Colleen Ward recently spent time there attending meetings as a Member of Global MINDS International Advisory Board. CACR Co-Director Prof Ronald Fischer also spent time with Global-MINDS teaching the Summer School, as did our alumna Dr Katja Hanke. Additionally the European Consortium Coordinator, Dr Melanie Vauclair, is also a CACR alumna!
Below, from left to right – Dr. Katja Hanke, Prof Ron Fischer, Dr Melanie Vauclair, and Prof Colleen Ward.
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Late last year Nelson Multicultural Council (NMC) contracted the CACR to conduct an analysis into the needs of migrants and former refugees in the Nelson Tasman region to better inform agencies and community organisations about what these people need to flourish and thrive in their new home.
CACR Founding Director, Professor Colleen Ward, developed the programme and four of our postgraduate students facilitated 11 workshops in the Nelson Tasman area with migrants and former refugees ably assisted by local NMC facilitators. Colleen delivered the final report to NMC and its stakeholders earlier this year and it has since been widely distributed to many government and NGO organisations. Read the full report here.
Additionally, the Nelson Mail covered the launch of the report with the headline, ‘Migrants bullied and discriminated against for different looks, speech and actions, new research suggests’.
Read more here.
Photo below, left to right: Nelson Multicultural Council coordinator Jenni Bancroft, Professor Colleen Ward and chairwoman Luz Zuniga at the presentation of research into the challenges and needs of migrants and refugees in the Nelson region.
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Visiting speakers
The Centre holds a weekly lab during term time which is primarily for the course requirements of our Masters degree in cross-cultural psychology, however it actually has a much wider audience than our MSc students and is regularly attended by PhD and undergraduate students, academic staff members and other interested parties. Occasionally external speakers are invited to present at the lab and the list below of our recent visitors will give you an idea of the fascinating topics that we have been privileged to hear about.
Decolonising cross-cultural research? Video and ‘retrospective hyper-self-reflexivity’
Associate Professor Sara Kindon, CACR Research Fellow
School of Geography, Environment and Earth Sciences, VUW
Ilan Kapoor (2005), drawing on the work of post-colonial studies scholar Gayatri Spivak, advocated for the practice of hyper-self-reflexivity during fieldwork involving ‘the Other’ as a potential means of decolonizing cross-cultural research. Yet, feminist geographers have noted the impossibility of transparent reflexivity undermining its ethical claims (Rose, 1997 among others). With the rise of video technology and calls for slow scholarship, however, different kinds of reflexive practice become possible through the close reading of historically-recorded footage of research practice.
In the presentation, Sara drew on the approach she developed to ‘excavate’ (Kapoor 2005) performative aspects of her own power, complicity and desire as the tauiwi academic researcher within a participatory video for research project with members of Te Iwi o Ngaati Hauiti and an Australian video ethnographer. She discussed how she selected key incidents for excavation and worked with a range of information sources inter-textually to interrogate her research practice. Using one particular incident, she demonstrated how retrospective hyper-self-reflexivity can offer cross-cultural researchers an opportunity for deeper ethical engagement with research partners in long-term partnerships, and may help foster more decolonizing practice.
Different looks on family health
Christine Gervais, RN, Ph.D. Visiting Scholar
Center of Research and Studies in Family Intervention, Université du Québec en Outaouais
Christine Gervais is professor in Nursing Science at the University of Québec in Outaouais. For over ten years she has worked on family health and cultural family issues. She studied the experience and health of immigrant families with a particular focus on father involvement and child mental health in diverse cultural contexts.
Christine will work collaboratively with the Cultural Applied Centre Research over the forthcoming months, and for her presentation she drew an overview of her research interests and works. As an example of her work, she presented some results of the project “Family relationships and paternal involvement in the context of migration: Representations of immigrant children” about immigrant children’s perceptions of their family relationships and their contributions to their adaptation throughout the migration process. She also discussed some issues for Child-Centered research.
Maintaining a threatened language in exile
Dr Arda Jebejian
Dr Arda Jebijian is Armenian. Her family fled Armenia after the Armenian Genocide of 1915-17 and she was born in Syria. She now lives in Cyprus. She has a doctorate of Applied Linguistics and TESOL from the University of Leicester, UK. Her research now is mainly focused on code-switching, sociolinguistics, language maintenance and language shift (LMLS), language death, and minority language rights. Her presentation focused on the plight of the Western Armenian language which is classed as threatened by UNESCO, and the efforts to maintain and revitalise it amongst the Armenian diaspora.
Predictive processing: from consciousness to culture?
Dr David Carmel
Senior Lecturer, School of Psychology, Victoria University of Wellington
The study of consciousness subjective experience has been influenced in recent years by a theoretical framework known as predictive processing: the idea that awareness is the mind’s best guess about reality – the outcome of continuously predicting the most likely causes of sensory events, and updating these predictions with a precision-weighted estimate of prediction error. In this talk, David began by describing the applicability of this framework to understanding perceptual processing, and moved on to discussing the possibility that the same mechanism is applied more generally, in any context where individuals need to construct representations of the reality they interact with. David delved briefly into examples involving cultural constraints on emotional experience, causes of societal change, and the formation of sociocultural norms.
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Staff awards and appointments
CACR Founding Director, Professor Colleen Ward, has been elected President-Elect of the IACCP (International Association for Cross-cultural Psychology) at their recently held conference in Guelph, Canada.
Colleen has also been invited by Immigration NZ to join the Expert Advisory Group to provide feedback on the development of a Cross-Government Intercultural Competence Development Programme.
CACR Co-Director, A/Prof Taciano Milfont, has been elected a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science. This is a very prestigious award and well deserved.
As an APS Fellow, Taciano now becomes part of a distinguished group of peers whose work has influenced the field of psychological science in important and lasting ways. Here is a list of new APS Fellows: https://www.psychologicalscience.org/members/fellows#recentfellows.
An announcement will appear in the September 2018 issue of the Observer.
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Conferences attended
Below is a summary of the papers that our academics have presented at some international conferences recently.
24th Congress of the International Association for Cross-cultural Psychology, Guelph, Canada
CACR Co-Director A/Prof Taciano Milfont and CACR Founding Director Prof Colleen Ward were in Guelph Canada in early July attending the 24th Congress of the International Association for Cross-cultural Psychology.
Colleen presented a paper titled “Multiculturalism in Socio-political Context” in an invite symposium organized by John Berry, and was involved in two panel discussions: “Cultural Intelligence and Cultural Competence” and “Women in IACCP.” Taciano’s paper was titled “Examining Within-Country Variability in Relational Mobility: Lessons from Brazil” which was co-authored by Robert Thomson and Masaki Yuki. Taciano was also involved in the presentation of a paper by Prof Ben Kuo (who was a Visiting Scholar to the CACR in 2015) as a co-author along with Z. Salam, K. Soucie, C. Ly, S. Huang and country collaborators. This paper was titled "Cultural coping with school burnout: A 15-country study".
Relational publication article at PNAS
As noted above, Taciano presented a talk investigating relational mobility in Brazil at the IACCP Congress. This is a follow-up (within-nation) study of a 39-nation comparison published recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. This large scale study was led by Prof Masaki Yuki (Hokkaido University) and Robert Thomson (Hokusei Gakuen University, Japan), who has visited CACR few times. You can find a press release about the article here: https://www.global.hokudai.ac.jp/blog/relational-mobility-may-influence-your-interpersonal-behaviors/ . You can also visit the project website here: http://relationalmobility.org/
29th International Congress of Applied Psychology, Montreal, Canada
Milfont, T. L., & Sibley, C. G. (2018, June). "Do environmental attitudes change over time?" In F. G. Kaiser (Chair), Environmental attitude: Troublemaker or silver bullet. Symposium at the 29th International Congress of Applied Psychology, Montreal, Canada.
Whitburn, J., Linklater, W. L., & Milfont, T. L. (2018, June). "Exposure to urban nature and active participation in tree planting relates to pro-environmental". In S. Clayton (Chair), The impact of personal experiences and relationship to nature on emotions, concerns, attitudes, and behaviors relating to nature and environmental issues. Symposium at the 29th International Congress of Applied Psychology, Montreal, Canada.
25th Conference of the International Association of People-Environment Studies, Rome, Italy
Besides two presentations listed below, Taciano also help run the Young Research Workshop which happened before the conference.
Poortinga, W., Milfont, T. L., & Sibley, C. G. (2018, July). "Does having children increase environmental concern? Testing the environmental legacy hypothesis with the New Zealand Attitudes and Values Study". Paper presented at the 25th Conference of the International Association of People-Environment Studies, Rome, Italy.
Bahho, M., Milfont, T. L., & Vale, B. (2018, July). "Investigating environmental values: The log cabin project". Paper presented at the 25th Conference of the International Association of People-Environment Studies, Rome, Italy.
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Publication round-up
Below is a list of some recent publications from our talented CACR academics:
The relationships between religiosity, stress, and mental health for Muslim immigrant youth Stuart, J., & Ward, C. (2018)
Mental Health, Religion and Culture, 21 (3), 246-261
Hybrid and alternating identity styles as strategies for managing multicultural identities Ward, C., Ng Tseng-Wong, C., Szabo, A., Qumseya, T., & Bhowon, U. (2018)
Journal of Cross-cultural Psychology
Relational mobility predicts social behaviors in 39 countries and is tied to historical farming and threat Robert Thomson, Masaki Yuki, Thomas Talhelm, Joanna Schug, Mie Kito, Arin H. Ayanian, Julia C. Becker, Maja Becker, Chi-yue Chiu, Hoon-Seok Choi, Carolina M. Ferreira, Marta Fülöp, Pelin Gul, Ana Maria Houghton-Illera, Mihkel Joasoo, Jonathan Jong, Christopher M. Kavanagh, Dmytro Khutkyy, Claudia Manzi, Urszula M. Marcinkowska, Taciano L. Milfont, Félix Neto, Timo von Oertzen, Ruthie Pliskin, Alvaro San Martin, Purnima Singh, and Mariko L. Visserman
PNAS June 29, 2018. 201713191; published ahead of print June 29, 2018
The Ethics of Allowing Participants to Be Named in Critical Research with Indigenous Peoples in Colonised Settings: Examples from Health Research with Māori in Macleod, C. I., Marx, H., Mnyaka, P. & Treharne, G. J. (Eds). Ashdown, J., Pidduck, P., Neha, T.N., Dixon, B., Aitken, C. E. & Treharne, G. J. (2018)
The Palgrave Handbook of Ethics in Critical Research. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. 273-289
A Longitudinal Study: New Zealand Māori and Western methods in gleaning the good oil with whānau (Māori communities and families) Neha, T. & Reese, E. (2018)
SAGE Research Methods Cases. SAGE Publications Ltd: London. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781526445001
Education Preferences of People with Gout: Exploring Difference Between Indigenous and Nonindigenous Peoples from Rural and Urban Locations Treharne, G. J., Richardson, A. C., Neha, T., Fanning, N., Janes, R., Hudson, B., Judd, A., Pitama, S. & Stamp, L. K. (2018)
Arthritis Care and Health, Vol. 0, (0), 1-8
Got milk? How freedoms evolved from dairying climates Van de Vliert, E., Welzel, C., Shcherbak, A., Fischer, R., & Alexander, A.C. (2018).
Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 49 1048-1065
Religion, neurosociology and evolutionary sociology: Knocking on an open door or why we need more interdisciplinary communication Fischer, R. (2018).
Journal for the Cognitive Science of Religion, 4, 43-47
Shamanism and the social nature of cumulative culture Nielsen, M., Fischer, R., & Kashima, Y. (2018). Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 41, e81
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