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This chapter reviews some of the recent literature exploring the possible meanings of music for promoting psychological wellbeing in different cultures. As a result, it can be suggested that even though the ways may be different, the reasons may be the same: the emotional, mental, and social domains appear recurrently as fundamental elements of the music-related enhancement of psychological wellbeing in a range of cultures. However, clear cultural differences are likely to exist regarding which aspects of these general elements become emphasized in a given cultural context. One possible difference may be that individualistic cultures appreciate music particularly as a means for supporting personal emotional work whereas collectivist cultures appreciate music especially as a form of social enjoyment.

This chapter reviews empirical studies of music and emotion that involve a cross-cultural comparison, and outlines prevailing views on the implications of such studies. It begins by discussing some theoretical implications of research on cross-cultural commonalities in the association between music and emotion. Section 27.2 reviews the central questions arising from cross-cultural research on emotion. Section 27.3 outlines the cue-redundancy model, developed to account for cross-cultural similarities and differences in the expression and recognition of emotion in music. Section 27.4 presents a broader framework for summarizing existing data on emotional communication, referred to as fractionating emotional systems (FES). FES extend the cue-redundancy model by accounting for similarities and differences in emotional communication, not only across cultures but also across the auditory channels of music and speech prosody. Section 27.5 reviews cross-cultural studies of music and emotion, while section 27.6 reviews cross-cultural studies of emotion in speech. Section 27.7 identifies some future prospects for the cross-cultural study of music and emotion.

A summary is given of the results obtained from all fifteen field sites of the cross‐cultural behavioural experiments project reported in the book and comparisons are made between them. Two lessons are drawn from the experimental results: first, there is no society in which experimental behaviour is even roughly consistent with the canonical model of purely self‐interested actors; second, there is much more variation between groups than has been previously reported, and this variation correlates with differences in patterns of interaction found in everyday life. The results are thought to bear on fundamental questions about human behaviour and society such as the nature of human motivations, and how these motivations are shaped by the societies in which people live, but the discussion is limited to the implications of the study for rational actor and similar models of human behaviour. The chapter is arranged in eight main sections which: (1) give an account of the cross‐cultural behavioural experiments project, describing the main economics experiments used – the Ultimatum Game (only this game was used at all experimental sites), the Public Goods Game, and the Dictator Game – and the locations and characteristics of the ethnographic studies involved (two each in Ecuador, Mongolia, Papua New Guinea and Tanzania; and one each in Bolivia, Chile, Indonesia, Kenya, Paraguay, Peru, and Zimbabwe); (2) present and analyse the experimental results; (3) attempt to explain differences in behaviour across groups; (4) attempt to explain individual differences in behaviour within groups; (5) discuss local group effects; (6) examine experimental behaviour in relation to everyday life; (7) discuss the research methods used and suggest ways that the between‐group behavioural differences found could have originated as products of patterns of social and economic interactions; and (8) draw conclusions.

In sections I-VII of this chapter I outline the theoretical background for a research programme considering whether the expressiveness of a culture's music can be recognised by people from different musical cultures, that is, by people whose music is syntactically and structurally distinct from that of the target culture. In sections VIII-IX, I examine and assess the cross-cultural studies that have been undertaken by psychologists. Most of these studies are compromised by methodological inadequacies.

This chapter focuses on the behaviour in the Ultimatum and Public Goods Games of the Tsimane’, a group of Bolivian forager–horticulturalists. The study attempts to answer two questions: (1) whether Tsimane’ game behaviour differs from the standard results found among westernized, market‐oriented, and industrialized populations, and (2) whether differential market exposure and acculturation affect norms of fairness and game behaviour across Tsimane’ villages. The chapter is arranged as follows: an introduction discusses cross‐cultural game results, makes some predictions for results from the Tsimane’, and describes their characteristics; next, the methods used are outlined and the results are presented and analysed; the final section of the chapter discusses several important questions raised by the research. Offers made by the Tsimane’ in the Ultimatum Game tended to be lower than those found among western populations and higher than those reported for the Machiguenga of Peru (ch. 5), while contributions in the Public Goods Game tended to be higher than those reported for the Machiguenga, but within the range found among western populations; there was also a high level of variation in the results from both games compared with standard western results. However, there were few differences in behaviour in either game that could be attributed to market exposure or acculturation, and the few differences that were there did not support the notion that exposure to modern markets produces game behaviour similar to that found in the west; the strongest predictor of game behaviour was village membership.

The conclusion then zooms back out once again, to review the larger implications of this study of the Kartābhajā sect. These are (in order from the most specific to the most general and comparative) the implications for: the study of colonial Bengal; Tantric studies (as embodied and historicized Tantra); and the study of esoteric traditions (uninitiated understanding). Reflections are then given on the general problem of secrecy, discourse, and authority. Finally, the author voices the hope that the approach taken in the book might have some broader comparative implications for the study of secrecy in other cultures (cross‐cultural studies).

Due to the broadness of the term ‘culture’, this chapter concentrates on macro-level cultural aspects and outlines several methods in the learning and exploring of the traditions, norms, and values of people from different orientations and backgrounds. It seeks to provide conceptual paradigms on intercultural studies from areas of the social sciences. Analysis of organisational behaviour using culture is essential for many reasons. First, the imposition of global standards to corporate institutions has turned into a compulsion instead of an exception. Second, the applicability of researches to different contexts, considering the diversity in norms, dispositions, practices, type of government, demography, location, restrictions, values, and other crucial factors is considered. Last, it is argued that the distinctions between cultures and countries should be propagated and incorporated in ‘cross-cultural’ studies.

In Chapter 6 (“Culture and Magical Thinking”), social and cultural factors in adults' magical beliefs are considered. With reference to relevant studies, the point is made that despite fundamental changes in cultural beliefs about the structure of the world in the last centuries, it can be the case that an average Western individual, at a certain level, remains relatively unaffected by these changes. For instance, the official culture and education can become increasingly dominated by beliefs in the overwhelming power of science and technology, yet many individuals in this culture can still entertain causal beliefs that are incompatible with scientific views. In this case, the individual can only be superficially affected by the changes in culture. On the level of intuitive beliefs, however, many contemporary Western individuals are not crucially different from individuals of the earlier historic epochs in their tendency to accept beliefs in magic and the supernatural. Experiments are presented that examine this hypothesis in a cross-cultural study in which magical beliefs in Mexico (a culture that has traditionally been tolerant of magical beliefs) and Britain were compared.

The Ultimatum Game was played with a group of traditional big game hunters: the Lamalera whalers of Nusa Tenggara, Indonesia, whose community is described in the first section of the chapter. The methods used for the study are then outlined and the results presented and discussed. The results were consistent in some ways with those from trials in western societies, with the primary difference that there were a number of cases of hyper‐fairness: one interpretation offered of these cases is that the whale hunters made strategic decisions when they made fair offers, but other explanations are also examined on the basis of the results of various cross‐cultural studies (including those in this book). These focus on the rejection of both fair and hyper‐fair offers in the Ultimatum Game (which have been interpreted as indicating an unwillingness to punish), and the issue of the variance seen in the cross‐cultural sample in this book in relation to fairness, for which strategic risk reduction is one explanation, but reputation effects are another, and the best model incorporates market integration and payoff to cooperation. The final section of the chapter discusses evolutionary theory and adaptive responses in relation to human cooperative behaviour.

The work of the cross‐cultural behavioural experiments project presented in this book is rooted in the logic of game theory and the practices of experimental economics, and this chapter provides an introduction to the fundamentals of behavioural game theory, and the procedures and conventions of experimental economics. It starts by defining the main social preference terms used – self‐interest, altruism, reciprocity, inequity aversion, and then sketches game theory in broad terms and describes some basic features of experimental design in economics. Seven games that have proved useful in examining social preferences are introduced; these are the Prisoner's Dilemma Game, the Public Goods Game, the Ultimatum Game, the Dictator Game, the Trust Game, the Gift Exchange Game, and the Third‐Party Punishment Game). The games are defined formally, indicating the aspects of social life that they express, and describing behavioural regularities found in experimental studies; these behavioural regularities are then interpreted in terms of preferences for reciprocity, inequity aversion, or altruism. The final sections of the chapter describe some other games anthropologists might find useful, and draw conclusions.

Family change theory (Kagitcibasi, 1996, 2007) is an alternative approach to explain how modernisation and globalisation processes affect the family. The most important assumption of the theory is that when traditional interdependent cultures modernise, they need not necessarily develop in direction of an independent family model typical for Western individualistic societies. Instead, they may develop towards a family model of emotional interdependence that combines continuing emotional interdependencies in the family with declining material interdependencies and rising personal autonomy. In this chapter a preliminary evaluation of the empirical status of family change theory is given, based on a review of recent cross-cultural studies. It will be shown in how far the few studies that have been systematically conducted in this respect have found results supporting or not supporting aspects of the theory, and where the strengths and problems of this research lie.

The origin and history of the (social) Preferences Network research project whose results are reported in the book is described. It is one of the research networks in the MacArthur Foundation style of MacArthur Economics Networks founded in 1993, and aimed to bring together economists, anthropologists, psychologists, and other behavioural scientists to develop systematically richer models of preferences according to which people take account of the effects of their actions on themselves and others, and in which the process determining outcomes matters as well as the outcomes themselves. Experimental economics played a large role in this particular network, which to start with was based on work (rooted in the logic of game theory) with undergraduate students, but then expanded into the cross‐cultural behavioural experiments project reported in the book. The chapter also presents a short outline of the structure of the volume.

The paper briefly reviews the scope of anthropological approaches to the cross-cultural study of aesthetics and beauty, and the ways in which anthropological approaches differ from those offered by evolutionary biology or psychology. The distinction between explanation and understanding is introduced, together with Tinbergen’s classification of types of explanation into causes, functions and history. Evidence for and against the universality of human appreciation of beauty is discussed. The relevance of evolutionary explanations for the origin of aesthetics to explaining its current social functions is assessed, together with archaeological evidence for the antiquity of aesthetic expression. I conclude that, while there is little doubt that aesthetic appreciation of symmetry is grounded in our evolved psychology, the socially-constructed environment plays a vital, perhaps pre-eminent role in determining the adaptiveness of alternative strategies for the display of artistic skills, and that the appreciation of beauty is now experienced in many contexts beyond those in which it plausibly evolved.

An analysis of the work of Paul Ekman, arguably the most influential figure in the emotion field today. According to Ekman's "neurocultural" version of Tomkins's affect theory, through socialization we expand the range of stimuli that can elicit our basic emotions and can learn to deliberately moderate our facial movements according to the conventions of "display rules." But under certain conditions the underlying basic emotions will betray themselves in micro-movements of the face discernible only to the trained expert. To clarify the methodological issues at stake in Ekman's research, the chapter discusses problems raised by his use of photographs of posed facial expressions as an experimental tool. It also explores the implications of Ekman's fundamental physiognomic assumption that a distinction can be strictly maintained between authentic and artificial expressions of emotion based on a differences between the faces we make when we are alone and those we make when we are with others. Throughout the discussion the aim is to bring out some of the tensions and contradictions inherent in Ekman's affect program model. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the influential neuroscientist Antonio Damasio's related claims about the emotions.

This chapter examines the imperative nature of gratitude. It provides evidence for the “gratitude imperative” in cross-cultural studies of gift giving and receiving and describes the ways by which gratitude compels people to return the benefit that they have received. It also evaluates how gratitude can be complicated by issues of power, social status, and dependence in instances of asymmetrical reciprocity.

The human mind often wanders forward in time to imagine what the future might be like (future-oriented cognition) and backward in time to remember personal events (episodic memory). Despite recent evidence, whether other animals—besides humans—can mentally travel in time is still the object of an arduous debate. In this chapter, the author critically reviews the theoretical and empirical assumptions behind this debate and questions the belief that the capacity for future-oriented cognition is uniquely human. The chapter concludes by arguing that the current view of the comparative research in future-oriented cognition is based on general theoretical constructs that are problematic, as well as on assumptions that have yet to be proved across different human populations. It calls for a broader theoretical and empirical approach in which not only cross-species studies but also cross-cultural studies are needed in order to understand future-oriented cognition.