Interest in the development of medical educators working in the postgraduate sector is running high. Driven by three interlinked trends--the professionalization of medical education, increasing accountability, and the pursuit of educational excellence--there is a growing need for high quality and sustained faculty development programmes across the network of education providers. Postgraduate me...

Two major theoretical orientations guide the investigation of medical problems in settings where Western medicine has not had a major influence. (In this report, for the sake of convenience, these settings will be termed preliterate.) These two orientations, which stem from the traditional fields of medicine and cultural anthropology, approach medical problems quite differently and, in addition...

We examined whether Japanese culture has become more individualistic by investigating how the practice of naming babies has changed over time. Cultural psychology has revealed substantial cultural variation in human psychology and behavior, emphasizing the mutual construction of socio-cultural environment and mind. However, much of the past research did not account for the fact that culture is ...

Formal models have linked prehistoric and historical instances of technological change (e.g., the Upper Paleolithic transition, cultural loss in Holocene Tasmania, scientific progress since the late nineteenth century) to demographic change. According to these models, cumulation of technological complexity is inhibited by decreasing--while favoured by increasing--population levels. Here we show...

Evolutionary approaches to cultural change are increasingly influential, and many scientists believe that a 'grand synthesis' is now in sight. The papers in this Theme Issue, which derives from a symposium held by the AHRC Centre for the Evolution of Cultural Diversity (University College London) in December 2008, focus on how the phylogenetic tree-building and network-based techniques used to ...

The authors hypothesized that economically motivated voluntary settlement in the frontier fosters independent agency. While illuminating the historical origin of American individualism, this hypothesis can be most powerfully tested in a region that is embedded in a broader culture of interdependence and yet has undergone a recent history of such settlement. The authors therefore examined reside...

Recent years have seen major advances in our understanding of the way in which cultural transmission takes place and the factors that affect it. The theoretical foundations of those advances have been built by postulating the existence of a variety of different processes and deriving their consequences mathematically or by simulation. The operation of these processes in the real world can be st...

The Patient Safety Consortium included a group of 26 diverse hospitals in or near California. In 2001 and 2002, many consortium hospitals were surveyed using the Patient Safety Climate in Healthcare Organizations (PSCHO) tool to present quantitative measures of hospital safety climate and qualitative reports on safety practices over 2 years. Investigators engaged in discussions with consortium ...

Early dialogues between parent and child constitute an important factor for the acquisition of culture and hence verbal interaction is considered to be a universal parenting system. Parenting strategies and socialization practices are strongly influenced by the cultural conception of the self, prototypically defined as the model of independence and interdependence. Our study focuses on the temp...

For the last several decades, Chinese society has experienced transformative changes. How are these changes understood among Chinese people? To examine this question, Part 1 in this research solicited folk beliefs of cultural change from a group of Chinese participants in an open-ended format, and the generated folk beliefs were rated by another group of participants in Part 2 to gage each beli...