developing cultural sensitive emotional competence assessment and training/ South Africa

Despite the truly multicultural nature of South-Africa, there is almost no expertise in cross-cultural psychology and almost no knowledge base on cultural differences and similarities in psychological functioning. The academic aims are therefore to develop a knowledge base on and sustainable competencies in cross-cultural psychological research. The practical aim is to apply this new knowledge in a prominent developmental context, namely the South-African Police Services (SAOS). Police officers very often find themselves in highly emotionally laden situations with persons from very diverse cultural backgrounds. Moreover, police work is often emotionally charting. Therefore, we want to construct a cultural-sensitive emotional competence training for the SAPS, in which police officers get more insight into emotion processes and their cross-cultural differences and similarities, and learn to deal with them more adequately both in terms of relations with clients as in terms of self-management. In addition to the training, a new cultural-sensitive emotional competence measurement instrument will be developed to study the effectiveness of the training in an evidence-based way.