Hispanic psychology has its roots in ethnic psychology and in cross-cultural psychology. The basic premise is that it is a valuable enterprise both theoretically and empirically to study the behavior of Hispanics. Over the past 25 years, research in Hispanic psychology has given way to a new scholarship or paradigm that calls for the recognition of intragroup variation which values within-group...

Pastoral Psychology is one of the oldest and most well established academic journals in the field of psychology and religion/spirituality. Since 1950, the journal offers an international interdisciplinary forum for the publication of original papers that discuss the work of caring for, understanding, and exploring human beings as persons, in families, in small groups, and in community. This pee...

Cumulative cultural evolution is what 'makes us odd'; our capacity to learn facts and techniques from others, and to refine them over generations, plays a major role in making human minds and lives radically different from those of other animals. In this article, I discuss cognitive processes that are known collectively as 'cultural learning' because they enable cumulative cultural evolution. T...

The investigation of cultural phenomena using neuroscientific methods-cultural neuroscience (CN)-is receiving increasing attention. Yet it is unclear whether the integration of cultural study and neuroscience is merely additive, providing additional evidence of neural plasticity in the human brain, or truly synergistic, yielding discoveries that neither discipline could have achieved alone. We ...

The goal of cross-cultural psychology to identify and explain similarities and differences in the behavior of individuals in different cultures requires linking human behavior to its context (Cole, Meshcheryakov & Ponomariov, 2011). In order to specify this relation, the focus is usually on the sociocultural environment and how it interacts with behavior. Since crosscultural psychology also dea...

This essay expounds on individuals’ acquisition and development of cultural competence via the process of communication. It highlights both the importance of culture and communication in our lives and the close associations between culture, communication, cultural literacy, and cultural competence. The author explicates the commonly experienced difficulty in “knowing the true face” of one’s cul...

This paper deals with differences in social motives between cultures and with respect to their development. First, social motives are described as complex functional systems. Then aggressiveness and achievement motivation are dealt with as examples. Assumptions about biological factors are discussed and cultural differences are reported. Based on cross-cultural research, variations in early mot...

D. Oyserman, H. M. Coon, and M. Kemmelmeier (2002) provide a most comprehensive review of empirical studies that used attitudinal surveys to capture cultural variations in individualism and collectivism. In the present article, the author suggests that the cross-cultural validity of attitudinal surveys can no longer be taken for granted. Moreover, the meta-theory underlying this literature (cal...