Definition
Etics refer to a universal (culture-general) phenomenon while emics refer to culturally unique (culture-specific) phenomenon of human psychological processes and traits.
Introduction
Psychologists, particularly in cross-cultural psychology, have sought both similarities and differences in human cognition, emotion, and behaviors across cultures. Through efforts to explain and predict both particularities of certain cultures and universality of human psychological processes across cultures, the terms etic and emic evolved from the linguistic usages and were coined by a notable linguist Kenneth Pike (1967). The term etic (whose first letter is pronounced as in empire) was derived from the linguistic term phonetics which features universal sound properties in any language. On the other hand, the term emic (whose first letter is pronounced as in peacock)...
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Moriizumi, S. (2018). Emic/Etic Approach. In: Zeigler-Hill, V., Shackelford, T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28099-8_658-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28099-8_658-1
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