Culture and Neural Frames of Cognition and Communication [Hardcover]

Cultural neuroscience combines brain imaging techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging and event-related brain potentials with methods of social and cultural psychology to investigate whether and how cultures influence the neural mechanisms of perception, attention, emotion, social cognition, and other human cognitive processes. The findings of cultural neuroscience studies improve our understanding of the relation between human brain function and sociocultural contexts and help to reframe the big question of nature versus nurture. This book is organized so that two chapters provide general views of the relation between biological evolution, cultural evolution and recent cultural neuroscience studies, while other chapters focus on several aspects of human cognition that have been shown to be strongly influenced by sociocultural factors such as self-concept representation, language processes, emotion, time perception, and decision-making. The main goal of this work is to address how thinking actually takes place and how the underlying neural mechanisms are affected by culture and identity.

This text covers the relationship between brain imaging techniques and social and cultural psychology. By analyzing the cultural influences on human cognition and its neural mechanisms it brings us closer to solving the big question of nature versus nurture.

Neuroplasticity: Biological Evolutions Contribution to Cultural Evolution .- Cultural Neuroscience of Social Cognition.- ?The Brain and Its Self: Concepts of Self and the Cortical Midline Structures.- ?Self Identity in Sociocultural Contexts: Implications from Studies of Self-face Recognition.- ?The Relation Between the Self and Others: A Transcultural Neuroimaging Approach.- Unconscious Self-processing: Subconscious, Unintentional or Subliminal?.- Brain, Behavior, and Culture: Insights from Cognition, Perception, and Emotion.- ?Psychological Time, Time Perspective, Culture and Confló