Cultural universals: So what?

produce cultural universals Anna

Looking across human societies reveals regularities in the languages that people speak and the concepts that they use. One explanation that has been proposed for these “cultural universals” is differences in the ease with which people learn particular languages and concepts. A difference in learnability means that languages and concepts possessing a particular property are more likely to be acc...

What Problem of Universals?

What is the Problem of Universals? In this paper we take up the classic question and proceed as follows. In Sect. 1 we consider three problem solving settings and define the notion of problem solving accordingly. Basically I say that to solve problems is to eliminate undesirable, unspecified, or apparently incoherent scenarios. In Sect. 2 we apply the general observations from Sect. 1 to the Pr...

History and Human Nature: Cross-cultural Universals and Cultural Relativities

What Questions Arise when Studying Cultural Universals in Depression? Lessons from Abnormal Psychology Textbooks

We examined 70 abnormal psychology textbooks published from 1920s to the present to identify consistent cross-cultural themes with regard to human depressive experiences over time and across regions of the world. The cultural and cross-cultural literature on abnormality and depression, in particular, has contributed to widening the scope of abnormal psychology textbooks over time. However, the ...

Psychological Universals 1 Running Head: PSYCHOLOGICAL UNIVERSALS Psychological Universals: What Are They and How Can We Know?

Psychological universals, or core mental attributes shared by humans everywhere, are a foundational postulate of psychology, yet explicit analysis of how to identify such universals is lacking. Drawing on the emerging field of cultural psychology, this article offers a conceptual and methodological framework to guide the investigation of genuine universals through empirical analysis of psycholo...