Much recent work stresses the role of embodiment and action in thought and reason, and celebrates the power of transmitted cultural and environmental structures to transform the problem-solving activity required of individual brains. By apparent contrast, much work in evolutionary psychology has stressed the selective fit of the biological brain to an ancestral environment of evolutionary adapt...

Cultural evolutionary models have identified a range of conditions under which social learning (copying others) is predicted to be adaptive relative to asocial learning (learning on one's own), particularly in humans where socially learned information can accumulate over successive generations. However, cultural evolution and behavioural economics experiments have consistently shown apparently ...

BACKGROUND Social anxiety disorder (SAD) has been repeatedly shown to be very prevalent in the Western society with prevalence rates of 10% or above. However, very few studies have been performed in the Middle East and in Arab countries. METHODS A total of 300 Israeli students participated in our study and were administered the Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale (LSAS), the Cheek and Buss Shyness...

OBJECTIVE To analyze experiences of heterosexual Mexican people living with HIV (PLWHA) related to the exercise of their sexual and reproductive rights. MATERIAL AND METHODS Qualitative study based on 40 in-depth interviews with PLWHA in four Mexican States. RESULTS Lack of support and counseling limits the exercise of sexual and reproductive rights by PLWHA, especially women. Principal lim...

In the generative tradition, the language faculty has been shrinking-perhaps to include only the mechanism of recursion. This paper argues that even this view of the language faculty is too expansive. We first argue that a language faculty is difficult to reconcile with evolutionary considerations. We then focus on recursion as a detailed case study, arguing that our ability to process recursiv...

This article examines relationships among top-management-team composition, group processes, and the effects of those processes on cohesion for international joint venture (IJV) teams in Thailand. For culturally diverse teams, demographic elements (member age, length of team tenure, level of education, functional expertise) and cultural characteristics (country of education, nationality, affilia...

Schizophrenia appears quite similar across a range of cultures. However, variability has been noted, and understanding the variant and invariant features of the disorder is necessary for elucidating its biological and environmental basis. Evidence of prominent emotion processing deficits in schizophrenia, including perceptual and experiential aspects, led us to extend the paradigm of standardiz...

Mainland China has undergone profound changes dating back to the nineteenth century, including a contemporary period of rapid modernization that began in the 1980s. The result has been dramatic social, cultural, and economic shifts impacting the daily lives of Chinese people. In this paper, we explore the psychological implications of sociocultural transformation in China, emphasizing two centr...

Learning by following explicit advice is fundamental for human cultural evolution, yet the neurobiology of adaptive social learning is largely unknown. Here, we used simulations to analyze the adaptive value of social learning mechanisms, computational modeling of behavioral data to describe cognitive mechanisms involved in social learning, and model-based functional magnetic resonance imaging ...

Conformist social learning can have a pronounced impact on the cultural evolution of human societies, and it can shape both the genetic and cultural evolution of human social behavior more broadly. Conformist social learning is beneficial when the social learner and the demonstrators from whom she learns are similar in the sense that the same behavior is optimal for both. Otherwise, the social ...