Cultural influences on depression: a new methodological approach and its results

Transcultural research into psychopathology has often failed to produce a systematic body of findings concerning the relationship between culture and psychopathology. In this paper an attempt is made to overcome this problem by examining the relationship between culture and depression in terms of a theoretical task. Japanese and Australian depressed patients were given measures of depression and decision making. The relationship between specific variables associated with depression and those associated with decision making was investigated. Results showed that those depression variables which influenced decision making for Japanese patients were different to those for Australian patients. These findings are discussed in terms of their implications for psychiatric diagnosis and understanding the relationship between culture and depression.