Seeking Cultural Competence From the Ground Up

Abstract

The present article briefly reviews early evidence of the applicability of acceptance and commitment therapy and its underlying psychological flexibility model to Asians and Asian Americans. Cultural adaptation is an important goal, and we describe how it might be due within a functional contextual approach, namely, by linking cultural knowledge to processes and principles of psychopathology and behavior change. This approach in essence links cultural adaptation to functional analysis. Ideas in the target article, for example about a transcendent sense of self, are used as examples of how this can be performed.