• Korean Journal of Culture and Social Issue
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• v.26 no.3
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• pp.221-257
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• 2020

This study examined whether popular music lyrics, the new research topic, reflect changes in Koreans' cultural orientation and whether individuals' cultural orientation is related to the genre of popular music that they prefer. In Study 1, we content analyzed popular music lyrics from 1980 to 2018 to see if Koreans' cultural orientations changed over time. The analysis showed that as the release dates approached the 2010s, the lyrics expressed the ideal attitudes of individualist cultures more frequently than those of collectivist cultures; this suggests that Koreans have gradually become more individualistic over time. In Study 2, we examined the relationships between individuals' cultural orientations, preferences for various genres of popular music, and functions of music. The analysis showed that people with more collectivistic attitudes tended to prefer mid- and low-arousal music, such as Ballads and Rap/Hiphop, while those with less collectivistic attitudes preferred high-arousal music, such as Rock/Metal. This result is partly consistent with the hypothesis that collectivistic people would prefer lower to higher arousal music. In addition, our analysis showed the strongest positive relationship between collectivism and the social function of music; this result can be interpreted as indicating that collectivistic people use music to maintain good interpersonal relationships. This paper concludes by discussing the implications of these findings, the limitations of this study, and directions for further research.

• Korean Journal of Culture and Social Issue
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• v.19 no.1
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• pp.69-86
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• 2013

The recent findings proposed and found that people from Eastern cultures could experience strong cognitive dissonance only when certain conditions, such as other-related choices, normative attitudes, were fulfilled. Even though such interesting findings are intuitively convincing on the basis of common understanding of individualist and collectivist cultures, the psychological mechanisms underlying the cultural variations of cognitive dissonance remain untested. The present study examined the role of attitude importance in cognitive dissonance by using the free-choice paradigm. After completing a pretest of individualism-collectivism scales, 60 college students ranked their preference to 10 items of either beverage or traffic regulations twice. Between the two ranking tasks, they were asked to engage in behavioral selection among their 5^th and 6^th preferred items. They also rated the personal importance of the preference. The results showed that attitude importance was positively correlated with attitude change and it could play a major role in experiencing cognitive dissonance beyond cultural orientation and situational factors. The current findings were discussed in universality of cognitive dissonance across cultures.

• Journal of International Area Studies (JIAS)
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• v.14 no.4
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• pp.79-106
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• 2011

The cultural contents industries have moved closer to the centre of the economic action in many countries and across much of the world. For this reason, the concern with the development of glocal cultural contents has also been growing. According to Goldman Sock's BRICs report, Indian economy will be the engine of global economy with China. In addition, India will be a new blue chip country for large consumer market of cultual contents. The most important point for the development of glocal cultural contents is a systematic and in-depth analysis of other culture. India is a complex and multicultural country compared with Korea which is a nation-state. Therefore, this paper is intended as an understanding about India appropriately and suggestion for a strategy to enter cultural industry in India. As the purpose of this paper is concerned, we will take a close look at 9 Indian culture codes which can be classified into three main groups: 1) political, social and cultural codes 2) economic codes 3) cultural contents codes. Firstly, political, social and cultural codes are i) consistent democracy and saving common people, ii) authoritarianism which appears an innate respect for authority of India, iii) Collective-individualism which represents collectivist and individualistic tendency, iv) life-religion, v) carpe diem. Secondly, economic culture codes are vi) 1.2billion Indian people's God which represents money and vii) practical purchase which stands for a reasonable choice of buying products. Lastly, viii) Masala movie and ix) happy ending that is the most popular theme of Masala movies are explained in the context of cultural content codes. In conclusion, 3 interesting cases , , will be examined in detail. From what has been discussed above, we suggest oversea expansion strategy based on these case studies. Eventually, what is important is to understand what Indian society is, how Indian society works and what contents Indian prefers.

• Korean Journal of Culture and Social Issue
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• v.29 no.2
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• pp.171-197
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• 2023

The traditional Korean society has been classified as an Eastern collectivist culture, but in the flow of globalization and digitalization along with the post-Cold War era of the 1970s, Western individualistic culture and values quickly permeated the Korean younger generation. Since rapid changes occurred within a short period of time, there may be differences in cultural self-construal between generations living in the same era. Due to this, psychological problems related to emotional expression and suppression may appear differently depending on generations. Therefore, in the current study, 1,000 Korean adult men and women from their 20s to 60s were investigated for their level of independent and interdependent self-construal, alexithymia, ambivalence over emotional expression(AEE) and emotional suppression(ES). Then the relationship between the variables(self-construal and alexithymia,) and the mediating process of AEE and ES were examined. The generation of participants were divided into the industrialization cohort (birth year < 1970) and the digitalization cohort (birth year starting from 1970). Using the PROCESS macro(Hayes, 2022), we tested a serial mediation model of AEE and ES between the relative independent self-construal(RIS) and alexithymia. The results indicate that the level of alexithymia increases by the serial increase of AEE and ES when RIS decreases. Next, we examined a moderation effect of generatione on the mediation process of AEE and ES, and found that generation moderates the relationship between ES and alexithymia. That is, the effect of ES on alexithymia is significant for the digitalization cohort, while it is not significant for the industrialization cohort. The current results imply that emotion regulation strategies of Koreans have been differently developed according to prevailing cultural values in each generation, and that the negative influence of emotion suppression could be different according to the cultural background of each generation.