Dov Cohen
Professor, Department of Psychology
Affiliated Faculty, Center for East Asian and Pacific Studies
Affiliated Faculty, Latin American and Caribbean Studies
Professor, College of Law (by courtesy)
About
Our research has focused mostly on the interaction of people, culture, and situations. We try to understand both individual differences (within-culture variation) and cultural differences (between-culture variation) in an integrated way. So, we try to understand the cultural logics that make each culture distinct, and we try to understand how people position themselves either toward or against the dominant logic of their culture (Leung & Cohen, 2006a). In this work, we have mostly compared face, dignity, and honor cultures. Another area of interest has to do with phenomenological perspectives on the self. How do people of different cultures experience the self? In our work, we have examined the insider and outsider perspectives that people may take on the self in Euro-American and Asian-American contexts (Cohen & Gunz, 2002; Cohen, Hoshino-Browne, & Leung, in press; Leung & Cohen, 2006b).
Two very new areas for us concern: 1) cultural difference in language use. More particularly, we are interested in how people of different cultures may describe reality in some fundamentally different ways. 2) The embodiment of cultural values, in which cultural values get encoded in the way we actually physically comport our bodies (*hard embodiment*) or the way we psychologically represent our bodies in our mental models (*soft embodiment*) (Leung & Cohen, 2006b).
Education
PhD University of Michigan
Areas of Expertise
Psychology and Law
Selected Publications
Cohen, D., Hoshino-Browne, E., & Leung, A. K.-y. (in press). Culture and the structure of personal experience. In M. P. Zanna (Ed.), Advances in Experimental Social Psychology. San Diego: Academic Press.
Cohen, D. (in press). Methods in cultural psychology. In S. Kitayama & D. Cohen (Eds.) Handbook of Cultural Psychology. NY: Guilford.
Cohen, D. & Gunz, A. (2002). As seen by the other…: Perspectives on the self in the memories and emotional perceptions of Easterners and Westerners. Psychological Science, 13, 55-59.
Vandello, J. & Cohen, D. (1999). Patterns of individualism and collectivism across the United States. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77, 279-292.
Cohen, D., Nisbett, R. E., Bowdle, B., & Schwarz, N. (1996). Insult, aggression, and the southern culture of honor. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 70, 945*960.