愛着システムの5国間比較文化的研究
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This study aims at cross-cultural comparisons of human attachment systems using a newly devised questionnaire. The term attachment in developmental psychology usually means close relations between the mother and child, but more generally it can be applied to all interpersonal relations, for example, between the father and child, husband and wife, among family members, close relatives, peers, friends and especially lovers etc.. Harry Harlow (1971) argues that macaques have five sorts of affectionate ties, for example, a mother monkey's affection to her offsprings, the baby monkeys' affection to their mothers etc., and these ties are hierarchically constructed and epigenetically developed. His idea is very interesting. In human beings, cross-sexual relations or parent-child relations are so universal because they can be highly determined by biological factors. We undoubtedly also have some types of affectionate ties similar to macaques. However, the importance of relations such as blood relations is probably determined by cultural factors. Confucian Ethics (Jyukyou), using this term I mean here the ethnic religious beliefs of the East Asian people, originating from China. Its central belief is the idea that preservation of one's own family line is the most important matter in his/her whole life. Consequently and naturally, close harmony and union among blood relatives and family members becomes a genuine source of human morality in Confucian ethics. The morality of filial duty hecomesthe highest virtue, and the more general moralities are derived from this matrix. For example, the ruler or the authority is regarded as the understudy of the parents and should be a target of one of the higher virtues, a virtue being dutyful to such persons with the same attitude as to one's own parents. In a word, each individual's identity, loyality, security, pride and morality have common roots in such a system of family in Confucian ethics. Only children are the keys to preserve his/her family line and blood relatives, so it is natural that they should become the most important treasure in any family. This belief can easily lead to secure attachment between parents and children. However, in Confucian ethics, only male children can preserve their family line, so sons are held in more respect than daughters. Accordingly, in East Asian countries, it is possible that mother-son relations are more worthy than mother-daughter relations. Also, blood relations may have higher value than in the Western world. Human affectionate ties may have far more varied and complex hierarchical structures than in the case of macaques. I call these ties as a whole human attachment systems. Knowlege on human attachment systems of an individual culture may give us an important key context to interpret various cross-cultural studies of mother-child interaction. So I tried to construct a new questionnaire to understand the human attachment systems in a comparative research between Japan and Korea, I have led for the latest four years. Method: The aim of this questionnaire is to determine a complex hierarchical structure by comparison of relative values of each attachment in a particular culture. One of the concrete examples of this questionnaire which aimed to compare the strength of attachment between blood relatives and friends is question no.4, "Love for relatives is much greater tftan love for friends". Thus, a new questionnaire consisting of a total of 48 questions, 38 such questions plus 10 dummy or relational questions, was constructed. As the subjects of this questionnaire survey, fathers and mothers of kindergarteners and male and female university students were chosen from five different countries, three East Asian, Japan, Korea and China and two Western, the United States and the Great Britain. However, in Britain, I could not get the subjects of fathers and mothers of kindergartners. Moreover, I chose Okinawan university students, because Okinawan culture directly influenced by Confucian ethics from China. This historical condition of Okinawan culture was similar to the Korean one and in contrast with most of the other subcultures in Japan, which accepted Confucian ethics through Korean mediation. So, total subjects consisted of 20 groups. Results: The results of this questionnaire survey, put simply, lead to the following five conclusions; First, there were so many questions unexpectedly showing almost the same answering tendencies. Seventeen questions got coincidental agreement and five got disagreement throughout almost all 20 groups. This means that there is a remarkable cultural universality of attachment systems among these five countries. Secondly, the above main coincidences were divided into two categories. One was about parent-chid attachment and the other is about cross-sexual love. Both attachments are similarly so intense that they were regarded as innate or instinctive. However, question no.37, "Love for members of the opposite sex is stronger than love for one's own child" was commonly denied, so in these two categories the former is stronger than the latter. Moreover, question no.5, "A child's attachment to his/her parents can be formed by the way the parents raise the child" received common and strong agreement. The parent-child attachment seems to hold in itself a sort of conflict, 'nature or nurture,' and this conflict is stronger in Asian countries than in Western ones. In this way, these two belong to very different categories of attachment Thirdly.some cultural specificities were also recognized. One of the typical questions showing such attitude was no.11, "It is natural to worship one's ancestors". To this question, Asian subjects' responses were all positive but Western ones' were all negative. This contrast is very impressive. It hardly needs to say that such an attitude represents one of the beliefs of Confucian ethics that preservation of each family line is the most important matter. These attitudes also represent some other aspects of the same Connician ethics. Then, where are the boundaries between different cultures? That is the fourth problem. To answer this question, I did a cluster analysis by Ward's method using the mean scores of the 20 groups, calculated according to the 5 points answering scales of the questionnaire. The results of the cluster analysis are shown as a dendrogram (cf. Figure). Looking at the Figure, locations of the first-order boundaries are quite obvious. The first one naturally exists between Asian and Western countries. And the second exists between China and Korea-Japan groups and also between the United States and Britain. Though commonly having the same Confucian ethics, modern China has particular political, economical and social systems and its Confucian beliefs seem to be relatively changing. For example, to the question no.10, "The more children you have the better" though all groups indicated their disagreements, the Chinese one is the strongest. This finding suggests one of the influences of the 'one child policy' of modern China and it undoubtedly makes the distance of the attachment-beliefs between China and Korea or Japan farther apart. A similar boundary also exists between the United States and Britain. The seconds-order boundaries are recognized between the generations of parents versus students in each country. Because fathers and mothers or male and female students in each country always form a pair without exception, the gender difference of the attachment-beliefs is minimal compared with cultural or generational differences. As for Korea and Japan, the distance between both parent groups is closer than that between both parent and both student groups. It can be concluded that the attachment-beliefs of Korean and Japanese people are very alike to each other. The fifth conclusion is closely related to the fourth finding. As described above, Okinawan and Korean cultures have a similar historical condition, however, the distance between Japanese and Japanese Okinawan students is closer than that between Japanese students as a whole and Korean students. Human attachment-beliefs may be more strongly influenced by contemporary mass cultures than by historical-cultural conditions in such a societies as Japan or Korea which are drastically changng into highly technological information societies.
- 国際基督教大学の論文
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