Psych thoughts: bicultural/dissociation

[azurelunatic]

I wonder if anyone's ever done a study on the incidence of dissociative coping mechanisms in people identifying as bicultural, especially when the two cultures in question are distinctly separated, say one culture in the home, and the other culture in the school or workplace.

I might be really interested in that study and the results.

Comments

[rusty-boscoes.livejournal.com]

I am, by the way, familiar with the concept of the dissociative state. I merely mean that the dissociate state would be the regression to previous behvaiors associated with the old culture. I still hold that the word "culture" is being mis-used by most people.

[azurelunatic]

I'm thinking mostly about people who are living in more than one culture at once, rather than people who live fully absorbed in one culture for a time and then live fully absorbed in another culture for a while.

Younger children who are moved from Japan, say, to the US at a young age adapt to the new culture very well. But (taking an example from my friends list) if an adult moves from Canada to Japan, they have to learn distinctly different rules for personal space and interaction and the like, even if they already know the language and have studied the society's rules of interaction theoretically. And they may find that they have to deal with culture shock yet again upon returning to Canada, if they've been gone a while and integrated more than they thought they had into the Japanese culture.