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Notions Of Spirits As Agents Of Mental Illness Among The Akan Of Ghana: A Cultural-Psychological Exploration, Annabella Opare-Henaku
Notions Of Spirits As Agents Of Mental Illness Among The Akan Of Ghana: A Cultural-Psychological Exploration, Annabella Opare-Henaku
Theses and Dissertations
The study explores lay conceptualizations of mental illness among the Akans of Ghana as influenced by their cultural worldview. Akan, the largest ethnic group in Ghana, is noted for the use of supernatural attributions for various health-related issues. The supernatural attributions are based on Akan ontological belief that the universe is unitary such that there is no clear distinction between physical and spiritual occurrences. This worldview guides Akans in how they deal with a wide range of issues including their mental health. Clinicians and other mental health professionals who rely solely on biomedical approaches to mental health fail to meet …
Efficacy Of Reach Forgiveness For Foreign And Virginia Students, Yin Lin
Efficacy Of Reach Forgiveness For Foreign And Virginia Students, Yin Lin
Theses and Dissertations
People agree that forgiveness is a virtue in essentially all countries. However, different cultures have different ideas about how willing one should forgive and under what circumstances. Although the study occurred in the USA, I recruited both foreign-extraction and Virginia born-and-raised female college students (N=102) to participate a six-hour REACH forgiveness intervention, promoting their forgiveness through psychoeducational groups. In my thesis, I investigated whether students of foreign extraction and Virginia-born students would respond similarly to the intervention. I operationalized culture in two ways—by country and by individual self-reported self-construal. I measured forgiveness using two measures—decisional forgiveness and emotional forgiveness. I …