This breakthrough volume brings together cultural neuroscience and intercultural relations in an expansive presentation. Its selected topics in reasoning, memory, and other key cognitive areas bridge the neuroscience behind culture-related phenomena with the complex social processes involved in seeing the world through the perspective of others. Coverage ranges beyond the familiar paradigms of acculturation and cultural differences to propose new ideas of potential benefit to the new generation of immigrants, negotiators, executives, and other travelers. Taken together, these chapters offer a deeper understanding of issues that can only become more important as the world becomes smaller and our global family larger. Among the topics featured: Intergroup relationship and empathy for others' pain: a social neuroscience approach. The neuroscience of bilingualism: cross-linguistic influences and cognitive effects. Cross-cultural reading the mind in the eyes and its consequences for international relations. Implications of behavioral and neuroscience research for cross-cultural training. Intercultural relations and the perceptual brain: a cognitive neuroscience perspective. How social dynamics shape our understanding of reality. With its elegant perspectives and empirical depth, Neuroscience in Intercultural Contexts is a forward-looking reference for researchers in the cultural sciences (cross-cultural psychologists, anthropologists, etc.) and in social, affective, and cognitive neuroscience.

This Handbook examines disparities in public health by highlighting recent theoretical and methodological advances in cultural neuroscience. It traces the interactions of cultural, biological, and environmental factors that create adverse physical and mental health conditions among populations, and investigates how the policies of cultural and governmental institutions influence such outcomes. In addition to providing an overview of the current research, chapters demonstrate how a cultural neuroscience approach to the study of the mind, brain, and behavior can help stabilize the quality of health of societies at large. The volume will appeal especially to graduate students and professional scholars working in psychology and population genetics. The Oxford Handbook of Cultural Neuroscience represents the first collection of scholarly contributions from the International Cultural Neuroscience Consortium (ICNC), an interdisciplinary group of scholars from epidemiology, anthropology, psychology, neuroscience, genetics, and psychiatry dedicated to advancing an understanding of culture and health using theory and methods from cultural neuroscience. The Handbook is intended to introduce future generations of scholars to foundations in cultural neuroscience, and to equip them to address the grand challenges in global mental health in the twenty-first century.

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.

Cultural neuroscience combines brain imaging techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging and event-related brain potentials with methods of social and cultural psychology to investigate whether and how cultures influence the neural mechanisms of perception, attention, emotion, social cognition, and other human cognitive processes. The findings of cultural neuroscience studies improve our understanding of the relation between human brain function and sociocultural contexts and help to reframe the “big question” of nature versus nurture. This book is organized so that two chapters provide general views of the relation between biological evolution, cultural evolution and recent cultural neuroscience studies, while other chapters focus on several aspects of human cognition that have been shown to be strongly influenced by sociocultural factors such as self-concept representation, language processes, emotion, time perception, and decision-making. The main goal of this work is to address how thinking actually takes place and how the underlying neural mechanisms are affected by culture and identity.

Clinical Cultural Neuroscience aims to provide clinicians and researchers with an overview of contemporary topics relevant to the study of culture in psychology and neuroscience. Within a translational thematic framework, this multidisciplinary volume surveys our current understanding of human behavior and culture along the spectrum of health and disease across multiple levels of analysis, from molecular genetics to sociocultural environment.