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How much cultural variation is explained by the physical and social ecologies people inhabit? Here, we provide an answer using nine ecological variables and 66 cultural variables (including personality traits, values and norms) drawn from the EcoCultural Dataset. We generate a range of estimates by using different statistical metrics (e.g. current levels, average levels across time, unpredictability across time) of each of the ecological variables. Our results suggest that, on average, ecology explains a substantial amount of human cultural variation above and beyond spatial and cultural autocorrelation. The amount of variation explained depended on the metrics used, with current levels and average levels of ecological conditions explaining the greatest amounts of variance in human culture on average (16% and 20%, respectively).

Cultural neuroscience research has provided substantial evidence that culture shapes the brain by providing systematically different sets of experiences. However, cultures are ever-changing in response to the physical and social environment. In the present paper, we integrate theories and methods from cultural neuroscience with the emerging body of research on cultural change and suggest several ways in which the two fields can inform each other. First, we propose that the cultural change perspective helps us reexamine what is meant by culturally typical experiences, which are shaped by the dynamic interaction between cultural norms, values, meanings, and other environmental constraints on behavior. It also allows us to make predictions about the variability/stability of cultural neural differences over time. Then, we discuss how methods used in cultural change research may be applied to cultural neuroscience research and vice versa. We end with a "blue sky vision" for a neuroscience of cultural change., (Copyright © 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Objective: We test the proposition that both social orientation and cognitive style are constructs consisting of loosely related attributes. Thus, measures of each construct should weakly correlate among themselves, forming intraindividually stable profiles across measures over time., Method: Study 1 tested diverse samples of Americans (N = 233) and Japanese (N = 433) with a wide range of measures of social orientation and cognitive style to explore correlations among these measures in a cross-cultural context, using demographically heterogeneous samples. Study 2 recruited a new sample of 485 Americans and Canadians and examined their profiles on measures of social orientation and cognitive style twice, one month apart, to assess the stability of individual profiles using these variables., Results: Despite finding typical cross-cultural differences, Study 1 demonstrated negligible correlations both among measures of social orientation and among measures of cognitive style. Study 2 demonstrated stable intraindividual behavioral profiles across measures capturing idiosyncratic patters of social orientation and cognitive style, despite negligible correlations among the same measures., Conclusion: The results provide support for the behavioral profile approach to conceptualizing social orientation and cognitive style, highlighting the need to assess intraindividual stability of psychological constructs in cross-cultural research., (© 2019 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.)

Recent work has documented a wide range of important psychological differences across societies. Multiple explanations have been offered for why such differences exist, including historical philosophies, subsistence methods, social mobility, social class, climactic stresses, and religion. With the growing body of theory and data, there is an emerging need for an organizing framework. We propose here that a behavioral ecological perspective, particularly the idea of adaptive phenotypic plasticity, can provide an overarching framework for thinking about psychological variation across cultures and societies. We focus on how societies vary as a function of six important ecological dimensions: density, relatedness, sex ratio, mortality likelihood, resources, and disease. This framework can: (a) highlight new areas of research, (b) integrate and ground existing cultural psychological explanations, (c) integrate research on variation across human societies with research on parallel variations in other animal species, (d) provide a way for thinking about multiple levels of culture and cultural change, and (e) facilitate the creation of an ecological taxonomy of societies, from which one can derive specific predictions about cultural differences and similarities. Finally, we discuss the relationships between the current framework and existing perspectives. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

The present study (N = 55) used an event-related potential paradigm to investigate whether cultures differ in the ability to upregulate affective responses. Using stimuli selected from the International Affective Picture System, we found that European-Americans (N = 29) enhanced central-parietal late positive potential (LPP) (400-800 ms post-stimulus) responses to affective stimuli when instructed to do so, whereas East Asians (N = 26) did not. We observed cultural differences in the ability to enhance central-parietal LPP responses for both positively and negativelyvalenced stimuli, and the ability to enhance these two types of responses was positively correlated for Americans but negatively for East Asians. These results are consistent with the notion that cultural variations in norms and values regarding affective expression and experiences shape how the brain regulates emotions.

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.

We show that differences in social orientation and in cognition that exist between cultures and social classes do not necessarily have counterparts in individual differences within those groups. Evidence comes from a large-scale study conducted with 10 measures of independent vs. interdependent social orientation and 10 measures of analytic vs. holistic cognitive style. The social measures successfully distinguish between interdependence (viewing oneself as embedded in relations with others) and independence (viewing oneself as disconnected from others) at the group level. However, the correlations among the measures were negligible. Similar results were obtained for the cognitive measures, for which there are no coherent individual differences despite the validity of the construct at the group level. We conclude that behavioral constructs that distinguish among groups need not be valid as measures of individual differences.

How much cultural variation is explained by the physical and social ecologies people inhabit? Here, we provide an answer using nine ecological variables and 66 cultural variables (including personality traits, values and norms) drawn from the EcoCultural Dataset. We generate a range of estimates by using different statistical metrics (e.g. current levels, average levels across time, unpredictability across time) of each of the ecological variables. Our results suggest that, on average, ecology explains a substantial amount of human cultural variation above and beyond spatial and cultural autocorrelation. The amount of variation explained depended on the metrics used, with current levels and average levels of ecological conditions explaining the greatest amounts of variance in human culture on average (16% and 20%, respectively). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human societies are not static. Attitudes, norms, institutions, behavior, and cultural products shift over time, sometimes with dizzying speed. However psychological science has either largely ignored cultural change or tacitly treated it as a source of noise. These changes in fact have important implications not only for psychological theory and research, but also policy, public health, and daily life. The present special issue draws together cutting-edge research and theory that addresses what one might think of as "the What," the "Why," and the "How" of cultural change. The articles encompass a range of theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches and focus on a diverse set of phenomena and processes ranging from personality to prejudice, to collective memory. Here we provide a brief overview and introduction, laying out our hopes to encourage more psychologists to consider cultural change in their own research and to join us in the emerging field of cultural dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We propose that grounded procedures may help explain psychological variations across cultures. Here we offer a set of novel predictions based on the interplay between the social and physical ecology, chronic sensorimotor experience, and cultural norms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Psychologists have long debated whether self-enhancement is universal or varies across cultures. Extant studies using explicit and implicit measures have provided mixed results. In this study (N = 93; 35 European American, 58 Chinese: 28 tested in English, 30 tested in Mandarin), we measured self-enhancement covertly using an ERP paradigm. Self-enhancement was also assessed via self-report and reaction-time based measures. Americans showed strong evidence of self-enhancement across all measures, whereas this effect was absent or weaker among Chinese, who instead showed an other-enhancing bias across measures. Language did not affect self-enhancement tendencies among Chinese participants, with the exception of one self-report measure. Nor did the two cultural groups differ in enhancement for a close other. This is the first study to directly compare self-enhancement across cultural groups using ERPs and provides evidence that positive self-regard does indeed vary by culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

More than half a century of cross-cultural research has demonstrated group-level differences in psychological and behavioral phenomena, from values to attention to neural responses. However, cultures are not static, with several specific changes documented for cultural products, practices, and values. How and why do societies change? Here we juxtapose theory and insights from cultural evolution and social ecology. Evolutionary approaches enable an understanding of the how of cultural change, suggesting transmission mechanisms by which the contents of culture may change. Ecological approaches provide insights into the why of cultural change: They identify specific environmental pressures, which evoke shifts in psychology and thereby enable greater precision in predictions of specific cultural changes based on changes in ecological conditions. Complementary insights from the ecological and cultural evolutionary approaches can jointly clarify the process by which cultures change. We end by discussing the relevance of cultural change research for the contemporary societal shifts and by highlighting several critical challenges and future directions for the emerging field of cross-temporal research on culture and psychology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study investigated whether and how self-construal priming influences empathic neural responses to others’ emotional states. We recorded event-related brain potentials to stimuli depicting the hands of unknown others experiencing painful or non-painful events from Chinese and Western participants after they had been primed in three conditions (independent self-construal priming, interdependent self-construal priming, and a control condition). Stimuli depicting painful events (as opposed to non-painful ones) elicited a positive shift of the fronto-central activity at 232–332 ms and of the central-parietal activity at 440–740 ms in the control condition. Moreover, neural responses to stimuli depicting painful (vs. non-painful) situations at 232–332 ms were decreased by interdependent self-construal priming among Chinese and by independent self-construal priming among Westerners. Our findings suggest that self-construal priming modulates sensitivity to perceived pain in unknown others and that this effect varies with culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract In recent years cultural psychology has expanded its approach to include the study of within-cultural variation. The present study explored the consequences of frontier settlement for contemporary regional variation in conformity in the USA. Consistent with the Voluntary Settlement Hypothesis, effect sizes in studies using classic experimental conformity paradigms in frontier states were found to be smaller than effect sizes in non-frontier states. Further, state-level conformity in experimental settings was found to correlate with state-level prevalence of popular names (a behavioral indicator of conformity) suggesting that regional variation in conformity in lab settings is related to regional variation in deliberate real-world decisions that reflect a preference for conformity or uniqueness. Implications for advertising and persuasive messages are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A large body of research documents cognitive differences between Westerners and East Asians. Westerners tend to be more analytic and East Asians tend to be more holistic. These findings have often been explained as being due to corresponding differences in social orientation. Westerners are more independent and Easterners are more interdependent. However, comparisons of the cognitive tendencies of Westerners and East Asians do not allow us to rule out alternative explanations for the cognitive differences, such as linguistic and genetic differences, as well as cultural differences other than social orientation. In this review we summarize recent developments that provide stronger support for the social orientation hypothesis. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A letter to the editor is presented in response to the article "The NEET and Hikikomori spectrum: Assessing the risks and consequences of becoming culturally marginalized" by Y. Uchida and V. Norasakkunkit in the 2015 issue.

People from different cultures vary in the ways they approach social conflicts, with Japanese being more motivated to maintain interpersonal harmony and avoid conflicts than Americans are. Such cultural differences have developmental consequences for reasoning about social conflict. In the study reported here, we interviewed random samples of Americans from the Midwest United States and Japanese from the larger Tokyo area about their reactions to stories of intergroup and interpersonal conflicts. Responses showed that wisdom (e.g., recognition of multiple perspectives, the limits of personal knowledge, and the importance of compromise) increased with increasing age among Americans, but older age was not associated with wiser responses among Japanese. Younger and middle-aged Japanese showed greater use of wise-reasoning strategies than younger and middle-aged Americans did. This cultural difference was weaker for older participants' reactions to interpersonal conflicts and was actually reversed for intergroup conflicts. This research has important implications for the study of aging, cultural psychology, and wisdom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]