Providing a new perspective on human brain functional organization, this book examines how sociocultural experience interacts with genes in shaping brain and behavior. Reviewing numerous studies, it considers the nature of the human brain and implications for education, cross-cultural conflict, and the clinical treatment of mental disorders.

In Our Biosocial Brains, Michele Lewis underscores culture, brain, behavior, and social problems to advocate for a more inclusive cultural neuroscience. Traditional neuroscientists to date have not prioritized studying the impact of power, bias, and injustice on neural processing and the brain’s perception of marginalized humans. Lewis explains current events, historical events, and scientific studies, in Our Biosocial Brains. Readers will be drawn to the relevancy of brain science to examples of injustices and social bias. Lewis also argues that incorporating non-western African-Centered Psychology is vital to diversifying research questions and diversifying interpretations of existing brain science, because African-Centered Psychology is not rooted in racist, classist, and exclusionary hegemonic methods. Lewis argues for attention to marginalized populations, regarding the impact of violence, disrespect, othering, slurs, environmental injustice, health, and general disregard on humans’ brains and behavior. Using hundreds of peer-reviewed studies and original research, the author presents scientific studies that are integrated with sociocultural explanations to foster wider understanding of how our sociocultural world shapes our brains, and how our brains’ responses influence how humans perceive and treat one another.

Based on three unifying ideas, this landmark volume defines an approach to sociocultural psychology which the authors hope will continue to be debated and redefined. It addresses the question of how mental functioning is related to its cultural, historical and institutional settings.

Research shows that between birth and early adulthood the brain requires sensory stimulation to develop physically. The nature of the stimulation shapes the connections among neurons that create the neuronal networks necessary for thought and behavior. By changing the cultural environment, each generation shapes the brains of the next. By early adulthood, the neuroplasticity of the brain is greatly reduced, and this leads to a fundamental shift in the relationship between the individual and the environment: during the first part of life, the brain and mind shape themselves to the major recurring features of their environment; by early adulthood, the individual attempts to make the environment conform to the established internal structures of the brain and mind. In Brain and Culture, Bruce Wexler explores the social implications of the close and changing neurobiological relationship between the individual and the environment, with particular attention to the difficulties individuals face in adulthood when the environment changes beyond their ability to maintain the fit between existing internal structure and external reality. These difficulties are evident in bereavement, the meeting of different cultures, the experience of immigrants (in which children of immigrant families are more successful than their parents at the necessary internal transformations), and the phenomenon of interethnic violence. Integrating recent neurobiological research with major experimental findings in cognitive and developmental psychology—with illuminating references to psychoanalysis, literature, anthropology, history, and politics—Wexler presents a wealth of detail to support his arguments. The groundbreaking connections he makes allow for reconceptualization of the effect of cultural change on the brain and provide a new biological base from which to consider such social issues as "culture wars" and ethnic violence.

Recent neuroscience research makes it clear that human biology is cultural biology - we develop and live our lives in socially constructed worlds that vary widely in their structure values, and institutions. This integrative volume brings together interdisciplinary perspectives from the human, social, and biological sciences to explore culture, mind, and brain interactions and their impact on personal and societal issues. Contributors provide a fresh look at emerging concepts, models, and applications of the co-constitution of culture, mind, and brain. Chapters survey the latest theoretical and methodological insights alongside the challenges in this area, and describe how these new ideas are being applied in the sciences, humanities, arts, mental health, and everyday life. Readers will gain new appreciation of the ways in which our unique biology and cultural diversity shape behavior and experience, and our ongoing adaptation to a constantly changing world.

In Voices of the Mind, James Wertsch outlines an approach to mental functioning that stresses its inherent cultural, historical, and institutional context. A critical aspect of this approach is the cultural tools or mediational means that shape both social and individual processes. In considering how these mediational means--in particular, language--emerge in social history and the role they play in organizing the settings in which human beings are socialized, Wertsch achieves fresh insights into essential areas of human mental functioning that are typically unexplored or misunderstood. Although Wertsch's discussion draws on the work of a variety of scholars in the social sciences and the humanities, the writings of two Soviet theorists, L. S. Vygotsky (1896-1934) and Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975), are of particular significance. Voices of the Mind breaks new ground in reviewing and integrating some of their major theoretical ideas and in demonstrating how these ideas can be extended to address a series of contemporary issues in psychology and related fields. A case in point is Wertsch's analysis of voice, which exemplifies the collaborative nature of his effort. Although some have viewed abstract linguistic entities, such as isolated words and sentences, as the mechanism shaping human thought, Wertsch turns to Bakhtin, who demonstrated the need to analyze speech in terms of how it appropriates the voices of others in concrete sociocultural settings. These appropriated voices may be those of specific speakers, such as one's parents, or they may take the form of social languages characteristic of a category of speakers, such as an ethnic or national community. Speaking and thinking thus involve the inherent process of ventriloquating through the voices of other socioculturally situated speakers. Voices of the Mind attempts to build upon this theoretical foundation, persuasively arguing for the essential bond between cognition and culture.

This book provides an indispensable account of current understandings of children’s emotional development. Integrating the latest research findings from areas such as attachment theory, neuroscience and developmental psychology, it weaves these into a readable and easy-to-digest text. It provides a tour of the most significant influences on the developing child, always bearing in mind the family and social context. It looks at key developmental stages, from life in the womb to the pre-school years and right up until adolescence, whilst also examining how we develop key capacities such as language, play and memory. Issues of nature and nurture are addressed and the effects of different kinds of early experiences are unpicked, looking at both individual children and larger-scale longitudinal studies. Psychological ideas and research are carefully integrated with those from neurobiology and understandings from other cultures to create a coherent and balanced view of the developing child in context. Nurturing Natures integrates a wide array of complex academic research from different disciplines to create a book that is not only highly readable but also scientifically trustworthy. Full of fascinating findings, it provides answers to many of the questions people really want to ask about the human journey from conception into adulthood. Visit Graham Music's personal site at http://www.nurturingminds.co.uk/.

Critical Neuroscience: A Handbook of the Social and Cultural Contexts of Neuroscience brings together multi-disciplinary scholars from around the world to explore key social, historical and philosophical studies of neuroscience, and to analyze the socio-cultural implications of recent advances in the field. This text’s original, interdisciplinary approach explores the creative potential for engaging experimental neuroscience with social studies of neuroscience while furthering the dialogue between neuroscience and the disciplines of the social sciences and humanities. Critical Neuroscience transcends traditional skepticism, introducing novel ideas about ‘how to be critical’ in and about science.

This volume presents recent empirical advances using neuroscience techniques to investigate how culture influences neural processes underlying a wide range of human abilities, from perception and scene processing to memory and social cognition. It also highlights the theoretical and methodological issues with conducting cultural neuroscience research. Section I provides diverse theoretical perspectives on how culture and biology interact are represented. Sections II –VI is to demonstrate how cultural values, beliefs, practices and experience affect neural systems underlying a wide range of human behavior from perception and cognition to emotion, social cognition and decision-making. The final section presents arguments for integrating the study of culture and the human brain by providing an explicit articulation of how the study of culture can inform the study of the brain and vice versa.

Exploration of a new integrative intellectual enterprise: the cognitive social sciences. Research in the cognitive sciences has advanced significantly in recent decades. Computational cognitive modeling has profoundly changed the ways in which we understand cognition. Empirical research has progressed as well, offering new insights into many psychological phenomena. This book investigates the possibility of exploiting the successes of the cognitive sciences to establish a better foundation for the social sciences, including the disciplines of sociology, anthropology, economics, and political science. The result may be a new, powerful, integrative intellectual enterprise: the cognitive social sciences. The book treats a range of topics selected to capture issues that arise across the social sciences, covering computational, empirical, and theoretical approaches. The chapters, by leading scholars in both the cognitive and the social sciences, explore the relationship between cognition and society, including such issues as methodologies of studying cultural differences; the psychological basis of politics (for instance, the role of emotion and the psychology of moral choices); cognitive dimensions of religion; cognitive approaches to economics; meta-theoretical questions on the possibility of the unification of social and cognitive sciences. Combining depth and breadth, the book encourages fruitful interdisciplinary interaction across many fields.