Mainstreaming Culture in Psychology

Despite the awakening to the importance of culture in psychology in America, international psychology has remained on the sidelines of psychological science. The author recounts her personal and professional experience in tandem with the stages of development in international/cross-cultural psychology. Based on her research in cross-cultural personality assessment, the author discusses the inadequacies of sole reliance on either the etic or the emic approach and points out the advantages of a combined emic-etic approach in bridging global and local human experiences in psychological science and practice. With the blurring of the boundaries between North American-European psychologies and psychology in the rest of the world, there is a need to mainstream culture in psychology's epistemological paradigm. Borrowing from the concept of gender mainstreaming that embraces both similarities and differences in promoting equal opportunities, the author discusses the parallel needs of acknowledging universals and specifics when mainstreaming culture in psychology. She calls for building a culturally informed universal knowledge base that should be incorporated in the psychology curriculum and textbooks.