Cultures Causation of Psychological Disorders: Eating

By

Chandler Vieira

Cultures Causation of Psychological Disorders: Eating 1
Background
When asked to choose a psychological area to research and to learn about i had to find out more information about eating disorders. As a kid i grew up in a big family and had many cousins that were older than me. When i would see my older cousins in particularly girls they would always be obsessing over how they looked and even though i was a very young age i could see that this was not just a interest in the way they perceived himself but more like an obsession. It all came together on one thanksgiving when i was ten.During thanksgiving we have a tradition to go to one of the many cousins house and have a party and wait until dinner to have a massive feast. This year we all sat down like normal but this time one of my female cousins did not want to eat. Her parents wanted her to eat and constantly told her to eat while we were all sitting at the table. After she eventually gave in, in fear she would get in trouble. After dinner i needed to go to the restroom and the closer of the two restroom was occupied so i went to the one farther away from the dining room. When i got there i opened up the door and found my cousin with her hand in her mouth with a bunch of throw up in the toilet. When she saw me she made me sware i wouldn't tell anyone and not knowing what was going on i said okay and never told anyone after that day. I didn't really understand what she was doing that day until i started to learn about eating disorders in health, which made everything more clear about the situation she was in and why she was in the bathroom doing what she did. This was a factoring reason why i'm taking psychology class, because i want to know her reasoning behind what she was doing and in a whole understand the problem she was having. So to better understand this topic i looked for factors that can affect eating disorders and one of the main factors is culture.

Cultures Causation of Psychological Disorders: Eating 2
Research topic:How acculturation affects eating habits
The first article that caught my eye was Perfection as Acculturation by Cindy Davis, Ph.D. and Melanie A. Katzman, Ph.D. The general research question of this article was to view the relationship that acculturation has with self esteem, depression and symptoms of eating disorders. In this study Cindy Davis and Melanie A. Katzman studied the similarities of psychological factors in eating disorders of Chinese female and male college student living in the United States. The significance of this study is great because there has only been one other study to view the factors western culture has on immigrants (Katzman & Leung, 1996) and only one specifically about asian students living living in the United states (Furukawa, 1994) . What makes this different is that in this study they talk specifically about how the impacts of acclimating to our culture and how it correlates with eating disorders for Chinese living in the United States from Hong Kong. Cindy Davis and Melanie A. Katzman study was to “assess psychological functioning as well as prodromal eating disordered attitudes in a sample of Chinese students living in the USA and to determine whether the degree of acculturation impacted these variables” (4 Cindy Davis, Ph.D. and Melanie A. Katzman, Ph.D) . They thought that culture did impact the Chinese students although they didn't know exactly how much it could.
Methods
The participants for this experiment were 197 single undergraduate female students in the USA. (93 females and 104 males).In this correlational study the students participated in in a self reported anonymous questionnaire which included “demographic data (e.g., height, weight), Cultures Causation of Psychological Disorders: Eating 3
Eating Disorder Inventory (EDI: Garner, Olmsted & Garfinkel, 1983), Center for