Cultural Neuroscience: Connecting Culture, Brain, and Genes
Title
Cultural Neuroscience: Connecting Culture, Brain, and Genes
Author
Kitayama, Shinobu
Huff, Sarah
Research Area
Culture
Topic
Culture and Cognition
Abstract
Cultural neuroscience emerged during the past decade at the intersection of cultural psychology, several subfields of human neuroscience, genetics, and epigenetics. In the present essay, we define the field, provide a selective review of its empirical accomplishment, and discuss its future directions. Cultural neuroscience conceptualizes the human mind as biologically prepared and grounded and, at the same time, as socially and culturally shaped and completed. This young field initially started as an effort to expand preceding behavioral work in cultural psychology with novel brain imaging methods. Increasingly, however, the field is poised to address the interplay between biology, environment, and behavior, as shown in our review of recent empirical work on (i) culture and the self, (ii) culture and genes, and (iii) multicultural identity. The future of the field hinges on several key initiatives including the use of brain stimulation methods, expansion of its database to cultures other than North America and Asia, and a more comprehensive analysis of gene–culture coevolution. In conclusion, we observe that further investigation of culture, brain, and genes may lead to an important insight that to study cultural diversity is no less to affirm the unity of humans as a common biological species.