Psychological Inquiry An International Journal for the Advancement of Psychological Theory Studying the Effects of Culture by Integrating Neuroscientific With Ethnographic Approaches (original) (raw)

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.

A Cultural Neuroscience Approach to the Biosocial Nature of the Human Brain

Annual Review of Psychology, 2013

Cultural neuroscience (CN) is an interdisciplinary field that investigates the relationship between culture (e.g., value and belief systems and practices shared by groups) and human brain functions. In this review we describe the origin, aims, and methods of CN as well as its conceptual framework and major findings. We also clarify several misunderstandings of CN research. Finally, we discuss the implications of CN findings for understanding human brain function in sociocultural contexts and novel questions that future CN research should address. By doing so, we hope to provide a clear picture of the CN approach to the human brain and culture and to elucidate the intrinsically biosocial nature of the functional organization of the human brain.

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.

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.

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?

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.

Cultural neuroscience of the self

Cultural neuroscience is an interdisciplinary field of research that investigates interrelations among culture, mind and the brain. Drawing on both the growing body of scientific evidence on cultural variation in psychological processes and the recent development of social and cognitive neuroscience, this emerging field of research aspires to understand how culture as an amalgam of values, meanings, conventions, and artifacts that constitute daily social realities might interact with the mind and its underlying brain pathways of each individual member of the culture. In this article, following a brief review of studies that demonstrate the surprising degree to which brain processes are malleably shaped by cultural tools and practices, the authors discuss cultural variation in brain processes involved in self-representations, cognition, emotion and motivation. They then propose (i) that primary values of culture such as independence and interdependence are reflected in the compositions of cultural tasks (i.e. daily routines designed to accomplish the cultural values) and further (ii) that active and sustained engagement in these tasks yields culturally patterned neural activities of the brain, thereby laying the ground for the embodied construction of the self and identity. Implications for research on culture and the brain are discussed.

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.