Launched in 2010, the Google Books Ngram Viewer offers a novel means of tracing cultural change over time. This digital tool offers exciting possibilities for cultural psychology by rendering questions about variation across historical time more quantitative. Psychologists have begun to use the viewer to bolster theories about a historical shift in the United States from a more collectivist to ...

Over the past few decades an emerging group of social scientists have been adopting evolutionary approaches to study socio-cultural change. Some have taken this approach to reconceptualise the small business’ struggle for survival as an evolutionary process in which the entrepreneur must ‘learn to evolve’. In this chapter, this practice-based evolutionary language is explored. Entrepreneurial l...

_______________________________________________________________________ One promising way to investigate the genealogy of norms is by considering not the origin of norms, but rather, what makes certain norms more likely to prevail. Emotional responses, I maintain, constitute one important set of mechanisms that affects the cultural viability of norms. To corroborate this, I exploit historical e...

The development of cultural psychiatry is reviewed at different stages historically in contemporary China during the past two and a half decades. Comments are made about the social, political, and professional reasons why the development of cultural psychiatry has been delayed, and what needs to be done to improve the situation in the near future, particularly to expand the concern from the min...

Is cross-cultural communication and criticism possible? This question is important question, since, if such cross-cultural practice is not possible, then development ethics, which applies ethical reflection to the ends and means of development, could only be used by citizens of a given country to think critically about their own country’s development goals and strategies. By contrast, if cross-...

High quality institutions, such as rule of law, bureaucratic quality, freedom from government expropriation, and freedom from government repudiation of contracts, mitigate the adverse economic consequences of ethnic fractionalization identified by Easterly and Levine 1997 and others. In countries with sufficiently good institutions, ethnic diversity does not lower growth or worsen economic poli...

Understanding the main values and beliefs that might promote humanized birth practices in the specialized hospitals requires articulating the theoretical knowledge of the social and cultural characteristics of the childbirth field and the relations between these and the institution. This paper aims to provide a conceptual framework allowing examination of childbirth practices through the lens o...