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.

Modes of Thought addresses a topic of broad interest to the cognitive sciences. Its central focus is on the apparent contrast between the widely assumed 'psychological unity of mankind' and the facts of cognitive pluralism, the diverse ways in which people think and the developmental, cultural, technological and institutional factors which contribute to that diversity. Whether described in terms of modes of thought, cognitive styles, or sensibilities, the diversity of patterns of rationality to be found between cultures, in different historical periods, between individuals at different stages of development remains a central problem for a cultural psychology. Modes of Thought brings together anthropologists, historians, psychologists and educational theorists who manage to recognise the universality in thinking and yet acknowledge the cultural, historical and developmental contexts in which differences arise.

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.

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.

Provides background content and teaching ideas to support the integration of culture in a wide range of psychology courses.

Ambitious and elegant, this book builds a bridge between evolutionary theory and cultural psychology. Michael Tomasello is one of the very few people to have done systematic research on the cognitive capacities of both nonhuman primates and human children. The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition identifies what the differences are, and suggests where they might have come from. Tomasello argues that the roots of the human capacity for symbol-based culture, and the kind of psychological development that takes place within it, are based in a cluster of uniquely human cognitive capacities that emerge early in human ontogeny. These include capacities for sharing attention with other persons; for understanding that others have intentions of their own; and for imitating, not just what someone else does, but what someone else has intended to do. In his discussions of language, symbolic representation, and cognitive development, Tomasello describes with authority and ingenuity the "ratchet effect" of these capacities working over evolutionary and historical time to create the kind of cultural artifacts and settings within which each new generation of children develops. He also proposes a novel hypothesis, based on processes of social cognition and cultural evolution, about what makes the cognitive representations of humans different from those of other primates. Lucid, erudite, and passionate, The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition will be essential reading for developmental psychology, animal behavior, and cultural psychology.

This book provides a state of the art review of selected areas and topics in cross-cultural psychology written by eminent figures in the field. Each chapter not only reviews the latest research in its respective area, but also goes further in integrating and synthesizing across areas. The Handbook of Culture and Psychology is a unique and timely contribution that should serve as a valuable reference and guide for beginning researchers and scholars alike.

This book offers valuable new insights into the design of culturally-aware systems. In its first part, it is devoted to presenting selected Culturally-Aware Intelligent Systems devised in the field of Artificial Intelligence and its second part consists of two sub-parts that offer a source of inspiration for building modelizations of Culture and of its influence on the human mind and behavior, to be used in new Culturally-Aware Intelligent Systems. Those sub-parts present the results of experiments conducted in two fields that study Culture and its influence on the human mind’s functions: Cultural Neuroscience and Cross-Cultural Psychology. In this era of globalization, people from different countries and cultures have the opportunity to interact directly or indirectly in a wide variety of contexts. Despite differences in their ways of thinking and reasoning, their behaviors, their values, lifestyles, customs and habits, languages, religions – in a word, their cultures – they must be able to collaborate on projects, to understand each other’s views, to communicate in such a way that they don’t offend each other, to anticipate the effects of their actions on others, and so on. As such, it is of primary importance to understand how culture affects people’s mental activities, such as perception, interpretation, reasoning, emotion and behavior, in order to anticipate possible misunderstandings due to differences in handling the same situation, and to try and resolve them. Artificial Intelligence, and more specifically, the field of Intelligent Systems design, aims at building systems that mimic the behavior of human beings in order to complete tasks more efficiently than humans could by themselves. Consequently, in the last decade, experts and scholars in the field of Intelligent Systems have been increasingly tackling the notion of cultural awareness. A Culturally-Aware Intelligent System can be defined as a system where Culture-related or, more generally, socio-cultural information is modeled and used to design the human-machine interface, or to provide support with the task carried out by the system, be it reasoning, simulation or any other task involving cultural knowledge.

Third edition of leading textbook offering an advanced overview of all major perspectives of research in cross-cultural psychology.