Thinking Style And Disease Cognitions Among Chinese.docVIP

Thinking Style And Disease Cognitions Among Chinese Yubo Hou Ying Zhu (Peking University, P. R. China) Kaiping Peng (University of California, Berkeley, USA) Abstract Thinking style reflects individuals’ tendencies and preferences for processing information. Cross-cultural studies have shown that the Americans tend to think in an analytic way, whereas the Chinese prefer to think in a holistic way. Previous studies have shown that the holistic thinking style comprises five dimensions: connection, change, contradiction, compromise, and harmony. This study examined how Chinese’s health cognitions are influenced by their thinking styles. Results indicated that individuals’ thinking styles, combined with gender, education level, and severity of the disease, influence their evaluation and attribution of the generation of and recovery from diseases. Implications for health psychology are discussed. Key words: culture, the Chinese Holistic Thinking Style Scale, health Acknowledgment: This research was supported by a grant from the Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China (01JAXLX003). Thinking Style And Disease Cognitions Among Chinese Thinking is a way of subjectively processing objective information. In the process of thinking, the essence and internal relations of things are understood based on retrieval of the information stored in memory and analysis of the received information using intellectual operations such as analysis, integration, and abstract generalization. From a traditional point of view in psychology, thinking seems to be invariable cross-culturally; that is, people think in almost the same way in different cultures (DeVos Hippler 1969, Hsu,1981). However, studies of cultural psychology have not supported the universal consistency of thinking. On the contrary, it is found that the characteristics of both thinking and processes of cognition are closely tied to culture (Morris Peng, 1994; Norenzayan, Choi, Nisbett,