Edited by: Vinai Norasakkunkit, Gonzaga University, USA
Reviewed by: Takeshi Hamamura, Curtin University, Australia; Toshie Imada, Brunel University, UK
*Correspondence: Takahiko Masuda, Department of Psychology, University of Alberta, BSP-123, Edmonton, AB T6G 2E9, Canada e-mail:
This article was submitted to Cultural Psychology, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology.
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
Research on cultural products suggest that there are substantial cultural variations between East Asian and European landscape masterpieces and contemporary members' landscape artwork (Masuda et al.,
Since cultural psychology has launched under the assumption that culture and psyche mutually construct one another in that our cultural meanings and practices bring rise to culturally specific ways of thinking and behaving, which in turn maintain culture (Bruner,
In addition to the investigation of cultural influences on basic psychological processes, notably attention, researchers have recently begun to investigate the other path in how people convey dominant cultural messages by producing cultural products—public, shared, and tangible representations (Morling and Lamoreaux,
In particular, Masuda et al.'s (
By analyzing the ratio of the horizon drawn to the frame and the number of objects used, which are useful indicators to indirectly measure people's degree of context sensitivity, Masuda et al. (
Recent advances of research on culture and psychology, however, revealed that the existing model of culture and psychology is vulnerable to cultural change and that in fact, culture is not static. Researchers who advocate the importance of cultural change have demonstrated evidence of dynamic shifts in social structures in a given culture, while highlighting the discord between new social structures and the human mind in accommodating to these changes, and the potential for consequential social problems (Hamamura,
For example, Tomasello (
Analyses of phylogeny require a research paradigm to examine the biological bases of human nature in a larger time frame. Therefore, it may not be applicable for most of the issues discussed in current cultural psychology. Historical and ontogenetic processes, however, have the potential to be incorporated into current research paradigms in cultural psychology. In fact, several studies have addressed the issues under the name of culture and history as well as culture and development.
Compared to research on ontogenetic processes, research on historical processes has not been fully examined in psychology. In the limited research that exists, studies on historical changes in self-esteem (Twenge and Campbell,
Along the reasoning of Tomasello (
The historical and ontogenetic research on culture and aesthetics provide us evidence that cultural variations in aesthetic expressions are substantial. However, these studies entail some critical drawbacks. First, in Masuda et al.'s (
Second, in Senzaki et al.'s (
To address these issues, we conducted two studies, one from an historical perspective, and one from an ontogenetic perspective. In Study 1, we examined whether culturally unique patterns of perception in artwork remained consistent throughout history or are subject to change through cultural exchange during the late 19th century, by comparing overall trends of the location of horizon in Japanese and Western landscape artwork from the 17th century through 20th century. In Study 2, we examined perceptual patterns in cultural products throughout development in order to determine whether cultural drifts occur during adolescence. Specifically, we investigated perceptual styles in how adolescents and adults in Japan and Canada created landscapes using both drawing (Study 2a) and collage (Study 2b) mediums. Within these artworks, we focused on horizon height, the number of objects, and the area covered by the objects in order to determine context-inclusiveness.
Because of the nature of exploratory investigation, potential changes in aesthetic expression will be treated as a result of
In order to investigate the process of cultural drift, Study 1 examined Japanese and Western historical landscape masterpieces from the 17 to 20th centuries using similar methodology as Masuda et al. (
Similar to Masuda et al. (
A 2 (Culture: Japanese Arts vs. Western Arts) × 6 (Time Period: 1600–1699, 1700–1799, 1800–1849, 1850–1899, 1900–1949, and 1950–1999) ANOVA was applied to the horizon height ratio of the historical landscape art. There was a significant main effect of culture,
Replicating Masuda et al.'s study (
In particular, the government established the Technical Art School (
Similarly, horizons in Western landscapes drastically changed from the 1900s, becoming higher than that of traditional masterpieces. We attribute this cultural drift to the results of
Finally, it is note-worthy that general patterns of cultural variations in the location of horizon were observed again in the late 20th century data. We interpret that although cultural drifts produced a variety of changes in artistic expressions, on top of the dynamic process, there is for certain room for people to rediscover their traditional ways of artistic expressions, which results in maintaining substantial cultural variations in artistic expressions. We speculate that the “resistant to change” effect is maintained beyond the artists' will. The dominant patterns of attention is internalized in the early part of the developmental trajectory, and strongly binds with other types of social cognition such as attitude inference, causal attributions, reasoning styles (e.g., Nisbett et al.,
In sum, historical analyses in Study 1 demonstrated both resilience to change and cultural drifts. Culture is constantly changing with the East and West influencing each other bidirectionally. At the same time, once an artistic expression becomes dominant in a given cultural milieu such an initial state can still be a powerful source to maintain culturally specific trends in artistic expression.
Different from historical analyses over centuries in Study 1, Study 2 focused on rather short term ontogenetic processes. Similar to methods used by Masuda et al. (
In the Japanese secondary school sample, there were 196 students (85 male, 107 female, 4 unspecified,
In the Canadian secondary school sample, there were 168 students (51 male, 117 female,
In the Japanese undergraduate sample, there were 75 students (38 male, 36 female, 1 unspecified,
A 2(Culture: Japan vs. Canada) × 6(Grade: Grade 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12) ANOVA was applied to the ratio of the horizon against the entire frame. The results indicated that there was a main effect of culture,
Next, to assess the generational trend of drawing, we combined and contrasted our data with elementary school data from Senzaki et al.'s (
Free drawings in Study 2a allowed us to measure one's natural expressions. However, due to the varying quality of artworks, it was difficult to count the number of objects and the area which objects occupied. To overcome these drawbacks and further scrutinize cultural differences and similarity in artworks, Study 2b used Senzaki et al.'s (
In the Japanese secondary school sample, there were 177 students (85 male, 89 female, 3 unspecified,
In the Canadian secondary school sample, there were 149 students (38 male, 110 female, 1 unspecified,
Similar to Study 2a, a 2(Culture: Japan vs. Canada) × 6(Grade: Grade 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12) ANOVA was applied to the ratio of the horizon against the entire frame. The results indicated that there was a main effect of culture,
After merging this data with Senzaki et al.'s (
Following merging this data with Senzaki et al.'s (
After merging our data with Senzaki et al.'s (
Study 2a and 2b's results with Senzaki et al.'s (
Why did Japanese adolescents' artworks become similar to that of their European Canadian counterparts? We assume the influence of Western popular cultures would be strong among Japanese adolescences. Young children of a given culture set their life task to internalize dominant cultural meaning systems into their behavior thorough interaction with their caregivers, teachers, and those who sustain the dominant norms. However, adolescent members are generally active in their seeking of alternative values, and developing sub-cultures within society, while searching for new, unfamiliar, and cool expressions. Therefore, they are very much susceptible to popular cultures developed in Western societies. Kinsella (
Although only a single observation suggested it, Canadian Grade 9 students in Study 2b placed a significantly larger number of objects in their artworks than did Japanese. We speculate that, although the effect is minor, recent trends of East Asian popular cultures may start to be consumed by Canadian adolescents. For example,
In sum, ontogenetic data of people's artistic expressions in Study 2a and b demonstrated that, although dominant patterns of artistic expressions in general exist, the results of Japanese adolescent data show evidence of cultural drift.
In an extension of Masuda et al.'s (
There are several implications for this research. First, investigating cultural products is an important and useful method to understand how culture is both created and maintained. Visual representations in particular are a rich medium and a snapshot in time in order to examine how psychological tendencies create and maintain culture. Although we focused only on landscape arts, there are many other media which can be a target of analyses such as movies, TV programs, flyers, and magazine ads (Masuda et al.,
Second, by utilizing the historical framework, the current paper demonstrated cultural drifts exist across time on top of the robust cultural variations in artistic expression. Future studies in psychology should thus integrate and explore more data in order to elucidate dynamic patterns regarding whether the human psyche is indeed changing according to an historical event and how it influences human psyche in a given culture, and what to possibly anticipate for the future. These investigations would not be actualized by experimentation commonly used in psychology as the current findings suggest the necessity of further collaborations with the fields of humanities such as philosophy, history, and art.
Third, the current studies suggest that cultures are not isolated from others—rather, they mutually influence each other through borrowing, imitating, and modifying foreign products to incorporate them into their culture, which is commonly observed in history. Our historical data suggest that is the case. Furthermore, researchers have recently been acknowledging that, with globalization processes, our psyche are inevitably influenced by other cultures (Chiu and Hong,
Our findings provide the first evidence of both historical and ontogenetic data which show cultural stability and drifts in people's artistic expressions. Nonetheless, to more comprehensively examine cultural variations in development as a function of historical circumstances, further examination is mandatory. First of all, a longitudinal study both within and between generations should be conducted in future research. For example, a future study may want to examine cultural products from different cohorts of East Asian and North American elementary school participants. By having a new cohort and following up with the previous one over set periods of time, cultural drift within individuals can be closely examined.
In addition, the current studies did not assess whether or not Japanese students had taken Western cultural courses or if Canadians had experience in East Asian cultural studies, and if these students had exposure to different perspectives for landscape art in their optional art classes. In future studies it may be useful to quantify whether or not participants are accessing or have exposure to artwork from other cultures. Careful examination of differences in educational systems may also further refine the quality of data.
Finally, and most importantly, the data were collected from only one or two schools in a specific area of each respective culture. Although we believe that students at the selected schools represented average adolescent and young adult behaviors in each culture, and although cultural psychologists conventionally collect data from a single research field per each culture, the generalizability of findings should be tested in future replication research. In fact, some studies have reported within-cultural differences in cognition and perception (e.g., Snibbe and Markus,
Culture is a dynamic process. Beyond the static perspective, the current findings provide the evidence of the effectiveness of historical and ontogenetic analyses of a cultural phenomenon (artistic expressions) and addressed the issue of cultural change under the rubric of cultural drift. Future research should further apply these approaches, alongside phylogeny, to elucidate dynamic relationships between culture and psychology.
The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
The Supplementary Material for this article can be found online at:
1Japanese landscape paintings from the 17th century usually lacked a specific date the painting was made or a distinguishable horizon.
2As for the statistical notations, we followed the logic of Howell's book “Statistical Methods for Psychology” (
3In Masuda et al. (
4Students from both cultural groups who did not follow instructions, such as missing a required item (
5Similar to Study 2a, students in Study 2b in both cultural groups who did not follow instructions (