A cultural psychological perspective on close relationships

People in different cultures have different objectives and ideals in close relationships. This chapter explores the different ideas, values, and practices that underlie people’s striving for different kinds of close relationships across cultures. It focuses on a comparison between “Western” and East Asian contexts. The chapter looks at a few select relational processes for which cross-cultural data are available: Attachment, relationship formation, conflict, and emotion. It proposes that some of the core ideas of cultural psychology are useful for understanding cultural variation in these relational process: there is meaningful cultural variation in each of these that can be understood from the relative foregrounding of either independence or interdependence in the respective cultural contexts. The chapter shows that there is at least one other way of relating that is systematically different from the independent model that has largely been assumed to be universal in close relationship research.