The culturally intelligent brain: from detecting to bridging cultural differences (original) (raw)
Related papers
Culture and the brain: Opportunities and obstacles
Asian Journal of Social Psychology, 2010
A major evolutionary advance of humans is a mind that is capable of constructing, perpetuating, adapting to, and exploiting culture. The birth of cultural neuroscience reflects the growing realization that a full account of the human mind requires understanding of the multiple and reciprocal influences between the biological and the sociocultural. In the present paper, we illustrate how attention to the brain, as exemplified in functional magnetic resonance neuroimaging (fMRI) studies of sociocultural processes, contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of the human mind. We end by discussing a set of challenges facing researchers using fMRI and the possible means for dealing with these challenges.
Current Directions in Psychological Science, 2009
The goal of this article is to highlight recent work examining how culture affects neural activation. We suggest a framework for cultural neuroscience in which there are two objectives: culture mapping—or the mapping function from patterns characteristic of cultures to their neural processing—and source analysis—or the attempt to determine the sources of observed commonalities and differences. We review links between culture and the brain across fundamental domains of cognitive and social psychology.
Cultural Neuroscience: Progress and Promise
Psychological Inquiry, 2013
The nature and origin of human diversity has been a source of intellectual curiosity since the beginning of human history. Contemporary advances in cultural and biological sciences provide unique opportunities for the emerging field of cultural neuroscience. Research in cultural neuroscience examines how cultural and genetic diversity shape the human mind, brain, and behavior across multiple time scales: situation, ontogeny, and phylogeny. Recent progress in cultural neuroscience provides novel theoretical frameworks for understanding the complex interaction of environmental, cultural, and genetic factors in the production of adaptive human behavior. Here, we provide a brief history of cultural neuroscience, theoretical, and methodological advances, as well as empirical evidence of the promise of and progress in the field. Implications of this research for population health disparities and public policy are discussed.
Concerns about cultural neurosciences: A critical analysis
Ten years ago, neuroscientists began to study cultural phenomena by using functional MRI. Since then the number of publications in this field, termed cultural neuroscience (CN), has tremendously increased. In these studies, particular concepts of culture are implied, but rarely explicitly discussed. We argue that it is necessary to make these concepts a topic of debate in order to unravel the foundations of CN. From 40 fMRI studies we extracted two strands of reasoning: models investigating universal mechanisms for the formation of cultural groups and habits and, models assessing differences in characteristics among cultural groups. Both strands simplify culture as an inflexible set of traits and specificities. We question this rigid understanding of culture and highlight its hidden evaluative nature.
Broadening the scope of cultural neuroscience
Chiao, Cheon, Pornpattananangkul, Mrazek, and Blizinsky offer a comprehensive review of cultural neuroscience research. For such a young field, cultural neuroscience has made great strides in the effort to understand the neural and genetic mechanisms underlying cultural differences in psychology. Here, we pose a set of questions that, if addressed in the future, may help develop the field. First, can cultural neuroscientists more deeply probe how environmental factors, such as pathogen threats, may have influenced genetic selection and, in turn, cultural differences in psychology (i.e., the culture-gene coevolutionary theory)? Second, can cultural neuroscientists help unravel whether and how aspects of cultural psychology are susceptible to change? Third, what can a cultural neuroscience perspective give back to other, related disciplines such as social cognitive neuroscience, genetics, and psychology more broadly?
Theory and methods in cultural neuroscience
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 2010
Cultural neuroscience is an emerging research discipline that investigates cultural variation in psychological, neural and genomic processes as a means of articulating the bidirectional relationship of these processes and their emergent properties. Research in cultural neuroscience integrates theory and methods from anthropology, cultural psychology, neuroscience and neurogenetics. Here, we review a set of core theoretical and methodological challenges facing researchers when planning and conducting cultural neuroscience studies, and provide suggestions for overcoming these challenges. In particular, we focus on the problems of defining culture and culturally appropriate experimental tasks, comparing neuroimaging data acquired from different populations and scanner sites and identifying functional genetic polymorphisms relevant to culture. Implications of cultural neuroscience research for addressing current issues in population health disparities are discussed.
Culture and neuroscience: additive or synergistic?
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 2010
The investigation of cultural phenomena using neuroscientific methodscultural neuroscience (CN)is receiving increasing attention. Yet it is unclear whether the integration of cultural study and neuroscience is merely additive, providing additional evidence of neural plasticity in the human brain, or truly synergistic, yielding discoveries that neither discipline could have achieved alone. We discuss how the parent fields to CN: cross-cultural psychology, psychological anthropology and cognitive neuroscience inform the investigation of the role of cultural experience in shaping the brain. Drawing on well-established methodologies from cross-cultural psychology and cognitive neuroscience, we outline a set of guidelines for CN, evaluate 17 CN studies in terms of these guidelines, and provide a summary table of our results. We conclude that the combination of culture and neuroscience is both additive and synergistic; while some CN methodologies and findings will represent the direct union of information from parent fields, CN studies employing the methodological rigor required by this logistically challenging new field have the potential to transform existing methodologies and produce unique findings.
Culture, Mind, and the Brain: Current Evidence and Future Directions
Annual Review of Psychology, 2011
Current research on culture focuses on independence and interdependence and documents numerous East-West psychological differences, with an increasing emphasis placed on cognitive mediating mechanisms. Lost in this literature is a time-honored idea of culture as a collective process composed of cross-generationally transmitted values and associated behavioral patterns (i.e., practices). A new model of neuro-culture interaction proposed here addresses this conceptual gap by hypothesizing that the brain serves as a crucial site that accumulates effects of cultural experience, insofar as neural connectivity is likely modified through sustained engagement in cultural practices. Thus, culture is "embrained," and moreover, this process requires no cognitive mediation. The model is supported in a review of empirical evidence regarding (a) collective-level factors involved in both production and adoption of cultural values and practices and (b) neural changes that result from engagement in cultural practices. Future directions of research on culture, mind, and the brain are discussed.
Culture Wires the Brain: A Cognitive Neuroscience Perspective
Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2010
There is clear evidence that sustained experiences may affect both brain structure and function. Thus, it is quite reasonable to posit that sustained exposure to a set of cultural experiences and behavioral practices will affect neural structure and function. The burgeoning field of cultural psychology has often demonstrated the subtle differences in the way individuals process information-differences that appear to be a product of cultural experiences. We review evidence that the collectivistic and individualistic biases of East Asian and Western cultures, respectively, affect neural structure and function. We conclude that there is limited evidence that cultural experiences affect brain structure and considerably more evidence that neural function is affected by culture, particularly activations in ventral visual cortex-areas associated with perceptual processing.
Culture: by the brain and in the brain?
Since the 1990s, several disciplines have emerged at the interface between neuroscience and the social and human sciences. For the most part, they aim at capturing the commonalities that underlay the heterogeneity of human behaviors and experiences. Neuroanthropology and cultural neuroscience, or the “neurodisciplines of culture,” appear different, since their goal is to understand specificity rather than commonality and to address how cultural differences are inscribed in the brain. After offering an overview of these disciplines, and of their relation to endeavors such as cultural psychology and social neuroscience, this article discusses some of the most representative studies in the area in order to explore in which ways they are relevant for an understanding of culture.