This Handbook examines disparities in public health by highlighting recent theoretical and methodological advances in cultural neuroscience. It traces the interactions of cultural, biological, and environmental factors that create adverse physical and mental health conditions among populations, and investigates how the policies of cultural and governmental institutions influence such outcomes. In addition to providing an overview of the current research, chapters demonstrate how a cultural neuroscience approach to the study of the mind, brain, and behavior can help stabilize the quality of health of societies at large. The volume will appeal especially to graduate students and professional scholars working in psychology and population genetics.

The Oxford Handbook of Cultural Neuroscience represents the first collection of scholarly contributions from the International Cultural Neuroscience Consortium (ICNC), an interdisciplinary group of scholars from epidemiology, anthropology, psychology, neuroscience, genetics, and psychiatry dedicated to advancing an understanding of culture and health using theory and methods from cultural neuroscience. The Handbook is intended to introduce future generations of scholars to foundations in cultural neuroscience, and to equip them to address the grand challenges in global mental health in the twenty-first century.

Joan Y. Chiao is Director of the International Cultural Neuroscience Consortium, an international, interdisciplinary organization dedicated to advancing theory and methods in cultural neuroscience to address issues in culture and health; Shu-Chen Li is a professor at Technische Universität Dresden in Germany, and holds the Chair for Lifespan Developmental Neuroscience in the Psychology Department. She is also an adjunct research scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, Germany; Rebecca Seligman is a medical and psychological anthropologist at Northwestern University who focuses on transcultural psychiatry, or the study of mental health in cross-cultural perspective; Robert (Bob) Turner is Director Emeritus of the Neurophysics Department at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany.

Introduction

Part I. Conceptual and Methodological Issues in Cultural Neuroscience
1. Locating Culture in the Brain and in the World: From Social Categories to the Ecology of Mind
Rebecca Seligman, Suparna Choudhury, and Laurence J. Kirmayer
2. Coding and Culture: Why Is There Enculturation of Brain? Cultural Neuroscience and Neurophilosophy
George Northoff
3. Sensory Enculturation and Neuroanthropology: The Case of Human Echolocation
Greg Downey
4. Health, Development, and the Culture-Ready Brain
Charles Whitehead
5. Culture as a Response to Uncertainty: Foundations of Computational Cultural Neuroscience
George I. Christopoulos and Phillipe N. Tobler

Part II. Cultural Neuroscience of Emotion
6. Cultural Values Modulate Emotional Processing in Human Amygdala
Tetsuya Iidaka and Tokiko Harada
7. Genes, Brain, and Culture Through a 5-HTT Lens
Michio Nomura
8. Embodied Brains, Social Minds: Toward a Cultural Neuroscience of Social Emotion
Mary Helen Immordino-Yang
9. Cultural Neuroscience in South Africa: Promises and Pitfalls
Dan J. Stein Joan Y. Chiao and Jack van Honk

Part III. Cultural Neuroscience of Cognition
10. Cross-Cultural Differences in Memory
Angela Gutchess and Sarah Huff
11. When Culture Informs Neuroscience: Considerations for Community-Based Neurogenetics Research and Clinical Care in a First Nation Community With Early Onset Familial Alzheimer Disease
Shaun Stevenson, Lindsey Bruce, Emily Dwosh, B. Lynn Beattie, and Judy Illes
12. Quantifying Culture: The Cultural Distance Hypothesis of Melodic Expectancy
Steven M. Demorest and Steven J. Morrison

Part IV. Cultural Neuroscience of Social Cognition
13. Cultural Neuroscience Studies of the Self-Reflection
Shihui Han and Yina Ma
14. Identifying a Cultural Resource: Neural Mechanisms Underlying Familial Influence on Adolescent Risk Taking
Eva H. Telzer, Andrew J. Fuligni, and Adriana Galván
15. Cultural Differences in Emotional Expressions and Body Language
Beatrice de Gelder and Elisabeth M.J. In't Veld

Part V. Cultural Neuroscience of Intergroup Processes
16. How Next-Generation Neuroscience Technologies Can Facilitate Comparison Across Cultural Contexts and Species: Implications for Global Health
Lasana T. Harris, Beatrice H. Capestany, and Jingzhi Tan
17. The Cultural Neuroscience of Intergroup Bias
Bobby K. Cheon and Ying-yi Hong
18. Cultural Neuroscience of Pain and Empathy
Joan Y. Chiao and Vani A. Mathur

Part VI. Culture and Genetics
19. The Gene-Culture Interaction Framework and Implications for Health
Joni Y. Sasaki, Jessica LeClair, Alexandria L. West, and Heejung S. Kim
20. Epigenetics of Social Behavior
Jessica J. Connelly and James P. Morris
21. The Encultured Genome: Molecular Evidence for Recent Divergent Evolution in Human Neurotransmitter Genes
Chuansheng Chen, Robert K. Moyzis, Xuemei Lei, Chunhui Chen, and Qi Dong

Part VII. Linking Population Health Disparities and Cultural Neuroscience
22. The Role of Culture in Population Mental Health: Prevalence of Mental Disorders Among Asian and Asian American Populations
Lawrence H. Yang and Jessica M. Benson
23. Culture, Genes, and Socioemotional Neurodevelopment: Searching for Clues to Common Mental Disorders
Joanna Maselko

Conclusion

Index