Belonging to several cultural groups at the same time can be associated with complex feelings of group membership. In this post, I will provide an explanation for the phenomenon whereby many immigrants marginalize—feel detached from the mainstream culture they live in and the heritage culture they grew up in—while feeling happy.

What are the outcomes associated with feeling culturally detached?

When individuals live actively with two cultures (in families, organizations or society at large) they, partly unconsciously, partly deliberately, may change towards acquiring a ‘bicultural mind’. I will discuss here whether these individuals are capable of spontaneously producing appropriate responses that fit the expectation patterns of either of their two cultures.

In a recent cross-cultural study of Facebook users in Japan and the US, I show that Japanese SNS users are more concerned about Internet privacy than American SNS users. And it turns out that because Americans have higher general trust, they less likely to believe that a stranger would take advantage of their private information, should it be leaked online.

Parents in societies around the world have big ambitions for their children. At the same time, those societies have become more competitive. In order to become a successful lawyer, you need a degree from an ‘excellent’ university. To get into that excellent university, you need to have outperformed your classmates in high school. In order to excel in high school, you need to have been acquainted with the hard work and motivation that is necessary to get top grades in your class in middle school, etc. etc.

Do you feel the need to feel good about yourself in order to be happy? Research suggests that if you have a lot of opportunities to make new friends, it is more likely that you will answer this question with a ‘yes’ than when you have more of a set group of people you spend time with. In this blog, I will describe the recent research on the influence of relational mobility and how it relates to the way in which we develop our self-esteem and happiness.

Shameless self-promotion on Facebook. Love it or hate it, there’s always someone doing it. And many of us are guilty of it. But why do we do it? Comparing Facebook users in the US and Japan, I suggest it’s the power of the social context that may determine who struts their stuff, and why.

Although a popular belief (and a heartwarming children’s song) hold that we all laugh in the same language, recent research has found that people are remarkably adapt at detecting local accents in the way that emotions are expressed.  In this blog, I will review research that suggests that the long-assumed universality of emotions is limited. 

In this post, I recount part of my journey into the nitty-gritty of cross-cultural differences in behavior. More specifically, I discuss the link between skateboarding across the USA, attractive Japanese women in tights, and the paradoxical nuances in conformity between cultures.