MSU Psychology Department

Vinai Norasakkunkit, Ph.D.

Degree, institution, year awarded

Ph.D. (Clinical Psychology), University of Massachusetts - Boston, 2003

Area(s) of specialization (e.g., areas of interest)

• cultural psychology
• culture and self
• intersection between social psychology and clinical psychology in cross-cultural perspective
• intersection of social psychology, evolutionary psychology, and behavioral economics
• Examining the role of implicit values and attitudes versus explicit values and attitudes in culturally patterned psychological processes and cultural change
• Understanding the nature of Japanese and American mentalities

Research Interests

Cultural influences on: 1) self-perception, 2) basic cognition and attention, 3) emotional tendencies, 4) motivational tendencies, 5) social cognition, 6) concepts of well-being, and 6) etiology and cognitive manifestations of emotional distress (e.g., social anxiety and depression).

Most of the data collection is between US and Japan.

Current research

I am currently working on several research projects, including ones that I am collaborating with graduate and undergraduate students. However, I have three main projects that I am personally working on with more projects under development. The three projects are summarized below:

Project title: Standardizing Cultural Priming Procedure in the United States and Japan
Summary: The following study addresses a movement in cross-cultural psychological research towards being able to treat culture as a true independent variable by utilizing an experimental method called cultural priming (i.e., deliberately activating one or another cultural mode of thought and being able to randomly assign participants to one of these conditions). While social cognition research in cultural priming has established evidence that Americans can be effectively primed to think relatively more like an Easterner or relatively more like a Westerner, the same methods do not seem to be effective in priming Japanese populations to think relatively more like an Easterner or relatively more like a Westerner (see Norasakkunkit, 2003). The current study attempts to develop an equally effective standardized priming method for both Japanese and American populations so that such a method can be used for future cross-cultural research, especially since cross-cultural research traditionally requires equivalency of methods to produce credible conclusions about cross-cultural differences or similarities.

Project title: Self-focused social anxiety and other-focused social-anxiety: Culture as a mediator between attention strategies and social anxiety.
Summary: The purpose of this study is to attempt to examine how culture mediates perceptual and attentional processes among individuals who score high on social anxiety in order to test the thesis that socially anxious individuals in the United States and Japan may be adopting perceptual and attentional strategies afforded by their respective cultures in excessive ways.

Project title: The Cultural Construction of Emotion and Subjective Well-Being:
The Role of Social Situations in Japan and the United States in Shaping Emotional Experience and Subjective Well-Being.
Summary: The aim of the current proposed cross-national study is to examine the impact of specific cultural situations and loose sets of meanings and practices that give rise to culturally variable emotions and emotional tendencies. It is hoped that this study will give further support to the view that human diversity is also represented by psychological diversity, which includes diversity in experiencing and expressing divergent categories of emotions. Furthermore, this study should provide support that the culturally variable experience and expression of particular categories of emotions are products of participating in a world of situations and loose sets of meanings and practices that shape natural emotional tendencies and implicit preferences for culturally congruent emotions and their relationship to emotional well-being.

Other projects in the early stages

• Examining the social, economic, environmental, and technological factors that contribute to a social problem called “Hikikomori” in Japan and its possible tendencies in the United States.
• Examining the role of valence (positive versus negative) in cultural images e.g., “Declaration of Independence” versus “Slavery”) as visual stimuli for priming culturally patterned modes of thought.
• Examining the role of implicit nationalism versus explicit nationalism and genuine patriotism (the predictive opposite of nationalism) in the success of adapting to a dramatically different culture.
• Understanding the relationship between cognitive dissonance and capacity to adjust to difficult situations from a cultural framework.

Selected publications / Selected presentations

• Norasakkunkit, V., & Kalick, M.S. (under review). Self-construal priming and emotional distress: Testing for cultural biases in the concept of distress and culture-related correlates of well-being. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology.
• Lee, Y-T., Norasakkunkit, V, Liu, Li, Zhang, J, & M. Zhou (under review). Taoist altruism and wateristic personality: East and West. In Vakoch, D. (Ed)’s Altruism in Cross-Cultural Perspective. .
• Uchida, Y., Norasakkunkit, V., & Kitayama, S. (2004). Cultural constructions of happiness: Theory and empirical evidence. Journal of Happiness Studies, 5, 223-239.
  Penney, S., Norasakkunkit, V., Leigh, J. (2002). New leaders for a new century. Building Leadership Bridges.
• Norasakkunkit, V., & Kalick, M.S. (2002). Culture, ethnicity, and emotional distress measures: The role of self-construal and self-enhancement. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 33 (1), 56-70.
  Kitayama, S., Markus, H.R., Matsumoto, H., & Norasakkunkit, V. (1997). Individual and collective processes in the construction of self: self-enhancement in the United States and self-criticism in Japan. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 72 (6), 1245-1267.

Courses taught

• Cultural Psychology
• Personality Psychology
• Social Psychology
• Statistics
• Research Methods and Design
• Introduction to Psychology
• History of Psychology

Link to personal website: http://krypton.mnsu.edu/~norasv