Author: Mark Schaller Publisher: Psychology Press ISBN: 113564814X Category : Psychology Languages : en Pages : 663
Book Description
How is it that cultures come into existence at all? How do cultures develop particular customs and characteristics rather than others? How do cultures persist and change over time? Most previous attempts to address these questions have been descriptive and historical. The purpose of this book is to provide answers that are explanatory, predictive, and relevant to the emergence and continuing evolution of cultures past, present, and future. Most other investigations into "cultural psychology" have focused on the impact that culture has on the psychology of the individual. The focus of this book is the reverse. The authors show how questions about the origins and evolution of culture can be fruitfully answered through rigorous and creative examination of fundamental characteristics of human cognition, motivation, and social interaction. They review recent theory and research that, in many different ways, points to the influence of basic psychological processes on the collective structures that define cultures. These processes operate in all sorts of different populations, ranging from very small interacting groups to grand-scale masses of people occupying the same demographic or geographic category. The cultural effects--often unintended--of individuals' thoughts and actions are demonstrated in a wide variety of customs, ritualized practices, and shared mythologies: for example, religious beliefs, moral standards, rules for the allocation of resources, norms for the acceptable expression of aggression, gender stereotypes, and scientific values. The Psychological Foundations of Culture reveals that the consequences of psychological processes resonate well beyond the disciplinary constraints of psychology. By taking a psychological approach to questions usually addressed by anthropologists, sociologists, and other social scientists, it suggests that psychological research into the foundations of culture is a useful--perhaps even necessary--complement to other forms of inquiry.
Author: Robert N. McCauley Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 9780521016292 Category : Psychology Languages : en Pages : 258
Book Description
Bringing Ritual to Mind explores the psychological foundations of religious ritual systems. Participants must recall their rituals well enough to ensure a sense of continuity across performances, and those rituals must motivate them to transmit and re-perform them. Most religious rituals the world over exploit either high performance frequency or extraordinary emotional stimulation (but not both) to enhance their recollection (literacy does not affect this). McCauley and Lawson argue that participants' cognitive representations of ritual form explain why. Reviewing a wide range of evidence, they explain religions' evolution.
Author: Jaan Valsiner Publisher: ISBN: 9788132108504 Category : Cognition and culture Languages : en Pages : 430
Book Description
This book presents a new look at the relationship between people and society, produces a semiotic theory of cultural psychology and provides a dynamic treatment of culture in human lives.
Author: Jaan Valsiner Publisher: SAGE Publications Pvt. Limited ISBN: Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 460
Book Description
Culture in Minds and Societies: Foundations of Cultural Psychology makes a decisive break from the post-modernist theoretical framework that considers knowledge as local and situation-specific. It restores the goal of construction of general knowledge to the social sciences. While recognizing the uniqueness of all human personal experience from birth to death, it emphasizes the universality of cultural organization of human minds and societies. The newly-developed hybrid of psychology, sociology, anthropology, history – cultural psychology – is fitting ground to research how human beings are social in their deeply subjective worlds. In the substantively inter-disciplinary framework of cultural psychology, the focus on phenomena becomes central to the investigation. The key to human culture is in the construction of signs – visual and verbal – and the regulation of human actions through hierarchies of signs. Socially, human beings are semiotic actors – their actions are mediated by signs as they explore the realms of life space. In terms of cognitive processes, human beings create new solutions to life’s problems that cannot be based fully on life experiences nor derived from general social representations. The book focuses on the construction of semiotic methodology for the social sciences. Empirical evidence from the world over brought into discussion in order to demonstrate the basic humanity that is present and expressed in many different forms. In short, this book presents a new look at the relationship between people and society, produces a semiotic theory of cultural psychology and provides a dynamic treatment of culture in human lives.
Author: Rob Ranzijn Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Australia ISBN: 1420256289 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 273
Book Description
This book fills an important gap in understanding the psychological impact of colonization on Indigenous Australians. Using cultural competence as a theoretical framework, it starts with an exploration of the nature of culture and worldviews which permeates and integrates the book. It provides a convincing explanation of how colonization has affected Indigenous Australians, the role of psychology in this process, and ways forward to redress Indigenous disadvantage. A key emphasis is on ‘doing our own work', the essential role of critical reflection in trans-cultural communication.
Author: Jerome H. Barkow Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA ISBN: 0195101073 Category : Behavior evolution Languages : en Pages : 679
Book Description
Although researchers have long been aware that the species-typical architecture of the human mind is the product of our evolutionary history, it has only been in the last three decades that advances in such fields as evolutionary biology, cognitive psychology, and paleoanthropology have made the fact of our evolution illuminating. Converging findings from a variety of disciplines are leading to the emergence of a fundamentally new view of the human mind, and with it a new framework for the behavioral and social sciences. First, with the advent of the cognitive revolution, human nature can finally be defined precisely as the set of universal, species-typical information-processing programs that operate beneath the surface of expressed cultural variability. Second, this collection of cognitive programs evolved in the Pleistocene to solve the adaptive problems regularly faced by our hunter-gatherer ancestors - problems such as mate selection, language acquisition, co-operation, and sexual infidelity. Consequently, the traditional view of the mind as a general-purpose computer, tabula rasa, or passive recipient of culture is being replaced by the view that the mind resembles an intricate network of functionally specialized computers, each of which imposes contentful structure on human mental organization and culture. The Adapted Mind explores this new approach - evolutionary psychology - and its implications for a new view of culture.
Author: Hector Y. Adames Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1317529804 Category : Psychology Languages : en Pages : 277
Book Description
Advancing work to effectively study, understand, and serve the fastest growing U.S. ethnic minority population, this volume explicitly emphasizes the racial and ethnic diversity within this heterogeneous cultural group. The focus is on the complex historical roots of contemporary Latino/as, their diversity in skin-color and physiognomy, racial identity, ethnic identity, gender differences, immigration patterns, and acculturation. The work highlights how the complexities inherent in the diverse Latino/a experience, as specified throughout the topics covered in this volume, become critical elements of culturally responsive and racially conscious mental health treatment approaches. By addressing the complexities, within-group differences, and racially heterogeneity characteristic of U.S. Latino/as, this volume makes a significant contribution to the literature related to mental health treatments and interventions.
Author: Mark Schaller
Author: John Tooby
Author: Robert N. McCauley
Author: Jaan Valsiner
Author: Jin Li
Author: Jaan Valsiner
Author: Rob Ranzijn
Author: Jerome H. Barkow
Author: Martin E. P. Seligman
Author: Hector Y. Adames