Cultural Behavior

Enhancing the development of intercultural communicative competence in business and study environments explores the development of intercultural communicative competence in English language teacher training and management. The author asks how establishing effective and appropriate behaviour within intercultural communication can promote effective communication in teacher training programmes and in management training. To answer this question, the article explores how the concept of intercultural sensitivity is integrated into intercultural communicative competence in training programmes and how it can facilitate the development of overall sensitivity. In doing so, it identifies some of the enabling and hindering features that shape the development of intercultural communicative competences in English language and culture in training courses in management or university.

This study seeks to explore two of the most widely spread socio–cultural mentalities in Singapore and in the Philippines (kiasuism and crab mentality); their possible repercussions in each country's economic development.
Singapore has surprisingly become one of the progressive countries in the world, and its economy continues to grow rapidly. This is in spite of its small size and lack of natural resources. This study hopes to address the question: In what way does “kiasuism” help the nation progress rapidly?
The Philippines, on the other hand, is a country with vast resources. However, its slow development remains a formidable challenge to its political leaders and economic experts. Studies have shown that poverty, unstable political leadership and uncontrolled population growth remain not only strong factors contributing to this debacle, even the Filipinos’ unique behavior of crab mentality also play a role. How does “crab mentality” of Filipinos play a part in our country’s stunted economic growth? On the other hand, how can such Filipino mentality exhibit a more optimistic change and help our nation become stronger?

A look at the representation of the female gender in the media and its effect. This essay concentrates on the British TV show "Drifters". A female driven production that identifies itself with crudeness and has subsequently been blamed as "damaging" and "un-feminist".

The role emotions play in the dynamics of cultural phenomena has long been neglected. The collection of articles recently published in Emotion Review provides an important first step into this necessary endeavor. In this commentary, we discuss this contribution by emphasizing the role epistemological parsimony should play in the future of this research agenda. The cultural behavior and emotions of chimpanzees is taken as reference.

This study will concentrate on the Romanian pilgrimage tourism supply, in order to identify the characteristics of pilgrimage products. Using the Hofstede’s approach for Romanian society, we develop a meta-analysis and a systematic review of the most important research studies done on this topic for Romanian culture. As a result, we have determined the weight of each cultural dimension and their effects on the religious tourism and pilgrimage behavior. We correlate the findings from Hofstede’s theory with the data about the supply of pilgrimages in our country: main pilgrimage routes, services provided by the hospitality units, seasonality, length of stay, tourism and religious objectives the pilgrims may visit.
The collectivism tendency and high uncertainty avoidance represent the main cultural aspects having an influence on pilgrims’ behavior and on the Romania’s supply of pilgrimages. As a result, most of the pilgrimages are concentrated in few destinations with a strong spiritual sense for an orthodox, have a small length of stay, while the services provided are customized to fulfill the pilgrims’ basic needs and emphasize the idea of sharing resources between pilgrims. The presence of a priest as a spiritual guide may lead to an improved pilgrimage experience.

In the last decade evidence of sophisticated symbolic and cultural behaviour among Neanderthals has accumulated substantially across Eurasia. This is exemplified by Neanderthal's usage of birds of prey feathers, talons, and phalanges at a number of European Mediterranean sites, by engraved rocks, lithics, and bone objects from a variety of places, the usage of spaces deep inside caves and colorants, by human burials, and potentially by cave paintings in Iberia, among further examples. The very notion of sophisticated symbolic and cultural behaviour in Neanderthals pivotally bears implications in regard to human evolution and the cognitive abilities of one of our genetically closest relatives. Is Homo sapiens as special as we like to believe, or have there been other human species that-under yet unknown circumstances-disappeared in the past, but had strikingly similar abilities? What are the cognitive underpinnings of these recent discoveries and recognitions? Do we need more research on human cognitive evolution, neurosciences and past brain development connected to these particular questions? The archaeological discoveries of objects with symbolically mediated behaviour lay the foundations for new possibilities to reconsider the very nature of Neanderthals-first regarded as primitives, later seen as capable of adapting to a variety of environments and climate changes, and now possibly as self-aware human beings that were able to communicate in abstract ways, displayed care for their deceased, and commanded imaginative means similar to us. Were these complex behaviours independent 'inventions' or the result of acculturation? Do we suffer from a historical legacy of seeing Neanderthals as 'the others'? Where do we stand today, and which direction does future research need to take in order to investigate such complex issues that ultimately aim to address one of the most essential questions humankind might have-what makes us human?

El aprendizaje de categorías es uno de los temas de mayor amplitud y controversia de la psicología contemporánea. Siguiendo al enfoque "biocomportamental" se describirán algunos aspectos comportamentales, neurofisiológicos y neuropsicológicos reportados recientemente. Los ...

Many students struggle with statistical concepts such as interaction. In an experimental group, participants took a paper-and-pencil test and then were given training to establish equivalent classes containing four different statistical interactions. All participants formed the equivalence classes and showed maintenance when probes contained novel negative exemplars. Thereafter, participants took a second paper-and-pencil test. Participants in the control group received two versions of the paper-and-pencil test without equivalence-based instruction. All participants in the experimental group showed increased paper-and-pencil test scores after forming the interaction-indicative equivalence classes. Class-indicative responding also generalized to novel exemplars and the novel question format used in the paper-and-pencil test. Test scores did not change with repetition for control group participants. Implications for behavioral diagnostics and teaching technology are discussed.

Enhancing the development of intercultural communicative competence in business and study environments explores the development of intercultural communicative competence in English language teacher training and management. The author asks how establishing effective and appropriate behaviour within intercultural communication can promote effective communication in teacher training programmes and in management training. To answer this question, the article explores how the concept of intercultural sensitivity is integrated into intercultural communicative competence in training programmes and how it can facilitate the development of overall sensitivity. In doing so, it identifies some of the enabling and hindering features that shape the development of intercultural communicative competences in English language and culture in training courses in management or university.

Thailand is undoubtedly growing in popularity as a tourist destination and is advertised in multiple tourism brochures and travel guidebooks. Despite its exotic appeal, a large number of tourists decide to experience it from inside all-inclusive hotels and resorts with little contact with the local population. Nonetheless there are a growing number of individual travellers trying to discover the country’s treasures off the beaten track, equipped with backpack and camera on the search for ‘the untouched’. Research in tourism has shown that tourists increasingly demand ‘authentic’ experiences (Butcher, 2003, MacCannell, 1999, & Wang, 1999). Still, there is not only a shift in tourist expectations to a closer contact with locals, but also in terms of tourism development and planning (Mowforth & Munt, 2003). Neoliberal politics were at the forefront of an intrusion by multinational companies based in foreign, mostly developed, countries focusing on economic gain with high proportions of...

Moser, Vera [Hrsg.]; Rendtorff, Barbara [Hrsg.]: Riskante Leben? Geschlechterordnungen in der Reflexiven Moderne. Opladen u.a. : Verlag Barbara Budrich 2012, S. 181-183. - (Jahrbuch Frauen- und Geschlechterforschung in der Erziehungswissenschaft; 8) Padagogische Teildisziplin: Schulpadagogik; Frauen- und Geschlechterforschung in der Erziehungswissenschaft; als elektronischer Volltext verfugbar

Category learning is one of the most controversial and widely studied topics of contemporary psychology. According to the “biobehavioral” approach, certain recently reported neuropsychological, neurophysiological and behavioral aspects will be described. The behavioral aspects of conceptual learning will be described from the experimental analysis of behavior, by providing a detailed account of the different stimuli (or categories) class types and of the manner in which they are studied in humans and other species. Particularly, the equivalence class paradigm, postulated by Sidman, will be dealt with, on account of the significant advances in the understanding of the behavioral bases of symbolic behavior. Afterwards, several intra-organic processes or events taking place during category formation will be described, from their corresponding analysis level: the neuroanatomical and the physiological ones. Also, the contributions to the application of the experimental and theoretical pa...