Cross-cultural studies usually compare the psychology of people from different countries and thus focus on how cultures influence people’s psychology. In contrast, in 2000, Hong, Morris, Chiu, and Benet-Martínez demonstrated the dynamics of cultural influence within individuals who have been exposed extensively to two cultures (biculturals); they showed that exposing Chinese American bicultural...

An area of knowledge creation can be said to come of age when it becomes integrated through publishing a handbook. The readers are the beneficiaries of that act, initiated by the Cambridge University Press in recognition of the vastly growing and socially important area. The world is filled with symbolic places in relation to which meaningful actions – tourist trips, pilgrimages, homecomings,wa...

The number of psychologists whose work crosses cultural boundaries is increasing. Without a critical awareness of their own cultural grounding, they risk imposing the assumptions, concepts, practices, and values of U.S.-centered psychology on societies where they do not fit, as a brief example from the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami shows. Hermeneutic thinkers offer theoretical resources for gaining...

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 ...

Objectives: To understand cultural issues within cultural sport psychology (CSP) research, methodological variation has been advocated. Those interested in carrying out CSP research with a ‘critical sensibility’ are presented with the challenge of deciding what methodology may capture a socially constructed and nuanced analysis of culture, self-identity and experience. In this paper we focus on...

While most psychologists recognize the importance of genes and culture in shaping human cognition, few theoretical perspectives in the field offer a framework for understanding their relationship and for deriving predictions about the structure of the variation we see across space and time. Here we argue that culture-gene coevolutionary (CGC) frameworks have such potential, and can unite dispar...

problem of understanding Japanese behavior, experience, and development (Kitayama & Markus, 1994; Stigler, Shweder, Goodnow, Hatano, LeVine, Markus, & Miller, 1998; Shweder, & Herdt, 1990). In terms of the cultural psychology of the Japanese, the studies by Markus and Kitayama (1991) and Wierzbicka (1996) are at the forefront. Markus and Kitayama suggest, for example, that the Japanese, along w...

Psychology has long ignored culture as a source of influence on human behaviour and still takes little account of theories or data from other than Euro-American cultures. This review deals with topics emerging in cross-cultural, cultural, and indigenous psychology and focuses on theoretical perspectives that shape current cross-cultural psychology. Theories at issue are put to the test as to th...

One of the many possibilities of understanding culture is proposed by Clifford Geertz who understood culture as “a system of control mechanisms— plans, recipes, rules, instructions ... that guide behavior”(Geertz, 1973). This opinion is based on the assumption that “man is exactly the animal that is the most dependent upon such control mechanisms that exist outside the skin” (p. 44). But these ...