My journey into Cultural Psychology 

From a very early age, I lived on a street where one of the houses was rented out to visiting professors, mostly from the United States and Japan. My siblings and I would play with their children.  

We didn’t share a common language, but somehow, we made it work. I grew particularly close to one boy from the U.S., and when his family returned to Pittsburgh, they invited me to come visit for the summer. 

So there I was, just twelve years old, getting on a plane to fly to this completely foreign country. It felt very cool at the time. 

I think that experience really sparked something in me. Even back then, I noticed that things were different culturally, though I didn’t yet have the language to describe it.  

That curiosity never really left me. 

After school, I lived in a commune in Canada and worked with children in need of special care. That made me want to study psychology, but my psychology programme did not really satisfy my curiosity about cultural diversity.  

So I took a detour to Japan to study Japanese Studies for a year, and immersed myself in a different cultural context.  

Eventually, I specialised in both clinical and cultural psychology. One is applied, the other more theoretical. That combination stayed with me and led to an ongoing question: how can I bring these two together? 

Asking the right questions 

During my therapy training in Berlin, I noticed how easily therapists apply their own assumptions to clients. Most of us were from West Germany but often worked with people who had grown up in East Germany, where values like family obligation and interdependence were more deeply rooted.  

In group discussions, I noticed a tendency to interpret these clients through a Western lens: “They haven’t separated properly from their families” or “They struggle with autonomy.” But what if autonomy isn’t the only goal? What if obligation to family isn’t a problem, but a different way of being? 

Cultural psychology taught me to pause and ask other questions. To explore what shaped someone’s worldview. Instead of assuming that my frame of reference is the only one, the questions become: “What did closeness mean in your family?” or “How did you learn to express care or independence?” 

Without that awareness, it’s easy to mistake cultural differences for deficits.  

Working with intercultural couples 

During my PhD and postdoc, I studied how culture shapes emotional experience, in particular in social situations. In one study, we found that when couples from different cultural backgrounds navigate disagreements, their emotional experiences and behaviours differ.  

For example, Belgian couples were experiencing and expressing more assertive emotions than Japanese couples, and they seemed to benefit from it.  

At the same time, I started seeing more and more intercultural couples in my practice, and I started started to realise how these differences can create challenges for intercultural couples. Couples may struggle to understand what emotions mean for each other.  

In recent years, I have explored both in therapy and research, how intercultural couples can navigate these potential differences in emotion. That is where cultural psychology becomes vital. 

Exploring emotional repertoires

In my work with intercultural couples, I like to integrate a cultural lens into emotion-focused therapy (EFT). I don’t always start with a formal tool, but when I sense that cultural meanings are deeply embedded or misunderstood between partners, I might draw on approaches like the cultural genogram.  

Rather than asking, “How is this impacted by your culture?”, I’ll ask: “What did your family believe about conflict?” or “What messages did you receive about feelings?” 

These questions help each partner explore the emotional repertoires they bring into the relationship: what they’ve inherited, how they relate to those messages now, and how these histories show up between them. 

Sometimes, we’ll map these stories visually. But more often, they emerge through conversation, as part of a deeper process of emotional discovery.  

Because we don’t just absorb cultural messages. We position ourselves in relation to them. And when partners begin to understand each other’s emotional landscapes in this way, it opens space for empathy and connection. 

Co-creating meaning 

This kind of exploration often leads to the  question: What do we value now, as a couple? 

Especially when partners come from different cultural backgrounds—or have relocated across contexts—this shared meaning-making is crucial. Even when certain norms have been left behind, they can resurface in emotionally charged moments.  

One partner might express certain emotions intensely, trying to connect, while the other withdraws, feeling overwhelmed or threatened. Both end up feeling misunderstood. 

That’s where EFT becomes so powerful. It helps partners move past surface reactions like anger or silence, toward the deeper feelings beneath: 

I feel lonely. I feel unsafe. I don’t feel good enough. 

And these feelings don’t exist in a vacuum. They’re shaped by culture, by what it means to be vulnerable, to ask for care, to express needs. That’s why I believe the goal isn’t just emotional expression, but expression in ways that can be heard and understood within both partners’ cultural frames.  

The role of cultural empathy 

Empathy is the thread that runs through all this work. And it’s not just a therapeutic ideal, it’s supported by data. In a recent study, we followed over 120 couples, both monocultural and East–West intercultural, for two weeks. We found that intercultural couples tended to report lower relationship satisfaction, which could be explained by the greater emotional differences they experienced in daily life. 

But here’s the hopeful part: when partners approached those differences with cultural empathy—an openness to understanding how culture shapes emotion—the negative impact of those differences was softened. In other words, empathy didn’t just help in theory, it made a measurable difference for these intercultural relationships. 

And that’s what Cultural Psychology equips you to do: to ask better questions, to listen more deeply, and to translate difference into connection.