7/12/00

Jenny Howard, 334/844-5741

NEPAL SERVES AS CULTURAL LAB FOR AU PSYCHOLOGY RESEARCH TEAM

AUBURN -- Nepal, the tiny and poor Asian country best know for Mt. Everest, is serving as cultural laboratory for an Auburn University social psychology research project team

The idea that spiritual values have an impact on how people respond to loss or illness has been increasingly popular among researchers and physicians.

Virginia O'Leary, chair of the AU Department of Psychology is expanding on earlier research by studying beliefs and behavior in a country dominated by the religions of Buddhism and Hinduism.

She has twice taken psychology graduate students to Nepal to gather data for research on positive responses to profound life challenges. During spring break, she took five of her graduate students to Kathmandu, Nepal's capital city, for a two- week intensive course on social psychology from a cross-cultural perspective.

A third-world nation where the per-capita income is less than $200 a year, Nepal is faced with grinding poverty and the problems -- including health issues -- it brings.

O'Leary is examining how the Nepalese handle poverty and how their response to adversity compares with the way Americans respond to similar situations.

"We have a textbook and meet for four hours in a formal class setting, and then we spend the rest of the day in the streets seeing the major sites, meeting people, and occasionally having dinner in Nepali homes," O'Leary said.

The approach gives the students a broader perspective of social behavior than they can obtain in a strict classroom setting, O'Leary said. The experience may also teach those in clinical counseling to better appreciate diversity in their clients in the United States.

O'Leary and her students are assisted in their research by students and faculty at the Tribhuvan University in Kathmandu.

"Nepalese believe in the Buddhist tenet of impermanence, which means that you believe everything is on loan and that nothing is yours forever," O'Leary says. "Here in the West, we believe, 'It's mine. It's going to be mine forever, and don't you dare take it.'

"If you believe that the world is an impermanent place, and if something is taken from you, be it one's health, the loss of a loved one, or something else, I suspect that the loss is not as traumatic."

O'Leary's students also will conduct a parallel investigation in the United States.

"We want to see if we can determine differences attributable to different world views among these two cultures," O'Leary says.

Some of their research findings were presented earlier this year at a Society of Behavioral Medicine meeting in Nashville, Tenn.

jul00:AU-nepal

CONTACT: O'Leary, 334/844-6657.