An Invitation to Cultural Psychology looks at the everyday life worlds of human beings through the lens of a new synthetic perspective in cultural psychology – that of semiotic dynamics. Based on historical work from many different fields in the social and behavioural sciences, and the humanities too, this perspective applied to cultural psychology suggests that human beings are constantly creating, maintaining and abandoning hierarchies of meanings within all cultural contexts they experience. It’s a perspective that leans heavily on the work of the great French philosopher, Henri Bergson, only now being realised as a core basis for human cultural living. Jaan Valsiner is the founding editor of the major journal in the field, Culture & Psychology, and Editor of the Oxford Handbook of Culture and Psychology. He is the first Niels Bohr Professor of Cultural Psychology at Aalborg University in Denmark, where he leads Europe′s first Research Centre on Cultural Psychology.

How close is feminist psychology to contemporary feminism? How can feminist psychological practice address issues of `difference' between women in meaningful ways? What price has feminist psychology had to pay for attempting to engage with mainstream psychology to revise and improve it? This book critiques feminist practice within psychology, and reflects the diversity from across the globe of feminist struggles around psychology. An international group of key feminist psychologists explore the relations between feminist politics and psychological practices in: transitional and postcolonial contexts; the distinct European traditions of critical psychology and women's studies; and psychology's colonial `centre' in the United

Organized around the theme of self-censorship -- the disconnect between what people privately think or feel and how they act publicly -- this brief seven-chapter text introduces students to social psychology by focusing on the field's most interesting studies and real-world applications. An INVITATION TO SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY contains high-interest studies that will engage students as they convey how social psychologists think about social life. Dale Miller shows that the common and extreme forms of social behavior are more alike than unlike. With an emphasis on social interaction in everyday situations, he makes connections to students' lives as if to say "we've all been in this situation."AN INVITATION TO SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY covers fewer studies but in considerably more detail than a traditional introductory text. It includes textured descriptions, so students come away with a deeper understanding of the core methodologies used by social psychologists to understand the world from a social psychological perspective. Miller achieves the balance of crafting a social psychology text that is valuable to instructors, while at the same time interesting and fun for students. Miller's text can be used as either a core or supplemental text in an introductory or advanced social psychology course.

This books arises from the observation that mainstream psychology, especially work and organisational psychology (WOP), suffers from critical limitations in its attempts to deal with the complexities of work as a cultural phenomenon. We can only mention a few examples here. In the WOP field, especially in Anglo- Saxon tradition, work experiences are seen through the lenses of traditional behavioural approaches, whereas culture is seen as a ‘software of the mind’, to use a popular definition found in this field (based on cross-cultural mainstream psychology). ‘Competences’, to take another example, are thought of as something that do or do not people have inside them. Suffering, like stress (a common work-based problem of our times), is considered to be dependent on a person’s personality, perceptions or as a set of behaviours triggered by facing an ‘objective’ environment. Even meaning-making process can be found to be defined from a WOP mainstream point of view: meanings are ‘social cognitions’ shared by people by means of unidirectional socialisation processes. Therefore, the goal of this book is to deliver to the reader a new and challenging theoretical and methodological tool box, inspired by insights developed from a broad cultural psychological perspective. Its focus is on the consideration of work and organisations based on core concepts developed inside cultural psychology. Therefore, it is designed to discuss potential extensions of these concepts to work psychology.

As the speed of globalization accelerates, world cultures are more closely connected to each other than ever before. But what exactly is culture? It seems to be involved in all psychological processes, but can its psychological consequences be studied scientifically? How can cultural differences be described without reifying culture and reinforcing cultural stereotypes? Culture and mind constitute each other, but how? Why do humans need culture? How did the evolution of the mind enable the development of human culture? How does participation in culture transform the mind, and how does the mind process and apply culture? How may culture become a resource for pursuing valued goals, and how does culture become part of the self? How do culture travelers navigate cultures and negotiate multiple cultural identities? The authors of this volume offer a refreshing theoretical perspective and organize seemingly disparate research evidence into a coherent body of psychological knowledge. With its accessible language and lively narrative, this volume engages its readers in an intellectual journey through the fascinating research literatures in psychology, anthropology, and the cognate disciplines. This book will make an ideal textbook for senior undergraduate and graduate courses on psychology and culture, cultural studies, cognitive anthropology, and intercultural communication.

Culture in Minds and Societies: Foundations of Cultural Psychology makes a decisive break from the post-modernist theoretical framework that considers knowledge as local and situation-specific. It restores the goal of construction of general knowledge to the social sciences. While recognizing the uniqueness of all human personal experience from birth to death, it emphasizes the universality of cultural organization of human minds and societies. The newly-developed hybrid of psychology, sociology, anthropology, history – cultural psychology – is fitting ground to research how human beings are social in their deeply subjective worlds. In the substantively inter-disciplinary framework of cultural psychology, the focus on phenomena becomes central to the investigation. The key to human culture is in the construction of signs – visual and verbal – and the regulation of human actions through hierarchies of signs. Socially, human beings are semiotic actors – their actions are mediated by signs as they explore the realms of life space. In terms of cognitive processes, human beings create new solutions to life’s problems that cannot be based fully on life experiences nor derived from general social representations. The book focuses on the construction of semiotic methodology for the social sciences. Empirical evidence from the world over brought into discussion in order to demonstrate the basic humanity that is present and expressed in many different forms. In short, 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.

Explains and explores the important areas of psychology through a cultural perspective This book addresses key areas of psychology, placing them in cultural perspective via a comprehensive overview of current work integrating culture across the major subfields of psychological science. Chapters explore the relation of culture to psychological phenomena, starting with introductory and research foundations, and moving to clinical and social principles and applications. It covers the subfields that are of most importance to undergraduates and beginning graduates, such as consciousness, development, cognition, intelligence, personality, research methods, statistics, gender, personality, health, and well-being. Cross-Cultural Psychology: Contemporary Themes and Perspectives, 2nd Edition is richly documented with research findings and examples from many cultures, illuminating the strengths and limitations of North American psychology, while also highlighting the diversity and vitality of this fascinating field. The book offers many new chapters, in addition to fully updated ones from the previous edition. Starting with basic concepts in the subject, the book offers chapters covering ethnocentrism, diversity, evolutionary psychology, and development across cultures. It also examines education, dreams, language and communication issues, sex roles, happiness, attractiveness, and more. Provides a comprehensive overview of current work integrating culture across major subfields of psychological science Offers introductory chapters on topics such as cultural psychology and ethnocentrism, which provide a foundation for more specialized chapters in development, education, cognition, and beyond Features new chapters in areas such as cultural competence, culture and dreams, education across cultures, abnormality across cultures, and evolutionary psychology Presents chapters by some of the leading contributors to the fields of cultural and cross- cultural psychology Cross-Cultural Psychology: Contemporary Themes and Perspectives, 2nd Edition is an ideal book for undergraduate and graduate courses in cultural or cross-cultural psychology.