With increasing globalization, countries face social, linguistic, religious and other cultural changes that can lead to misunderstandings in a variety of settings. These changes can have broader implications across the world, leading to changing dynamics in identity, gender, relationships, family, and community. This book addresses the subsequent need for a basic understanding of the cultural dimensions of psychology and their application to everyday settings. The book discusses the basis of culture and presents related theories and concepts, including a description of how cognition and behavior are influenced by different sociocultural contexts. The text explores a broad definition of culture and provides practical models to improve intercultural relations, communication, and cultural competency. Each chapter contains an introduction, a concise overview of the topic, a practical application of the topic using current global examples, and a brief summary. This up to date overview of psychology and culture is ideal reading for undergraduate and graduate students and academics interested in culturally related topics and issues.

Cultural Psychology draws upon major psychological topics, theories, and principles to illustrate the importance of culture in psychological inquiry. Exploring how culture broadly connects to psychological processing across diverse cultural communities and settings, it highlights the applied nature of cultural psychology to everyday life events and situations, presenting culture as a complex layer in which individuals acquire skills, values, and abilities. Two central positions guide this textbook: one, that culture is a mental and physical construct that individuals live, experience, share, perform, and learn; and the second, that culture shapes growth and development. Culture-specific and cross-cultural examples highlight connections between culture and psychological phenomena. The text is multidisciplinary, highlighting different perspectives that also study how culture shapes human phenomena. Topics include an introduction to cultural psychology, the history of cultural psychology, cultural evolution and cultural ecology, methods, language and nonverbal communication, cognition, and perception. Through coverage of social behaviour, the book challenges students to explore the self, identity, and personality; social relationships, social attitudes, and intergroup contact in a global world; and social influence, aggression, violence, and war. Sections addressing growth and development include human development and its processes, transitions, and rituals across the lifespan, and socializing agents, socialization practices, and child activities. Additionally, the book features discussions of emotion and motivation, mental health and psychopathology, and future directions for cultural psychology. Chapters contain teaching and learning tools including case studies, multidisciplinary contributions, thought-provoking questions, class and experiential activities, chapter summaries, and additional print and media resources.

This thought-provoking treatise explores the essential functions that culture fulfills in human life in response to core psychological, physiological, and existential needs. It synthesizes diverse strands of empirical and theoretical knowledge to trace the development of culture as a source of morality, self-esteem, identity, and meaning as well as a driver of domination and upheaval. Extended examples from past and ongoing hostilities also spotlight the resilience of culture in the aftermath of disruption and trauma, and the possibility of reconciliation between conflicting cultures. The stimulating insights included here have far-reaching implications for psychology, education, intergroup relations, politics, and social policy. Included in the coverage: · Culture as shared meanings and interpretations. · Culture as an ontological prescription of how to “be” and “how to live.” · Cultural worldviews as immortality ideologies. · Culture and the need for a “world of meaning in which to act.” · Cultural trauma and indigenous people. · Constructing situations that optimize the potential for positive intercultural interaction. · Anxiety and the Human Condition. · Anxiety and Self Esteem. · Culture and Human Needs. A Psychology of Culture takes an uncommon tour of the human condition of interest to clinicians, educators, and practitioners, students of culture and its role and effects in human life, and students in nursing, medicine, anthropology, social work, family studies, sociology, counseling, and psychology. It is especially suitable as a graduate text.

This book presents a new look at the relationship between people and society, produces a semiotic theory of cultural psychology and provides a dynamic treatment of culture in human lives.

Incorporates over a decade of new research and material on coping with the causes and consequencs that instigate culture shock, this can occur when a person is transported from a familiar to an alien culture.

The most contemporary and relevant introduction to the field, Cultural Psychology, Fourth Edition, is unmatched in both its presentation of current, global experimental research and its focus on helping students to think like cultural psychologists.