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The studies of culture and biology have historically been stratified; however, recent advances in cultural and biological sciences provide novel opportunities for understanding the nature and origin of human diversity by bridging these gaps. Our goal in this chapter is to illustrate the integration of theory and methods in cultural and biological sciences. Cultural neuroscience is an emerging interdisciplinary science that investigates how cultural and genetic diversity affect psychological and neural processes in the production of human behavior. We provide a historical background and theoretical rationale for cultural neuroscience as well as empirical. We further illustrate that a complete understanding of human nature will be elusive without accounting for how cultural and genetic diversity affect the mind, brain, and behavior across multiple timescales. Implications of cultural neuroscience research for basic and applied fields, including merging the scientific study of culture and biology, interethnic ideology, and population health, are discussed.

This chapter considers the emergence, since the 1990s, of fields whose names often combine the suffix neuro with the name of one of the human and social sciences, from anthropology and art history to education, law and theology. These “disciplines of the neuro” reframe the human sciences and their corresponding subjects on the basis of knowledge about the brain. Driven by the availability of imaging technologies, they look for neural correlates of behaviors and mental processes. Brain imaging studies since the early 1990s have increasingly dealt with topics of potential ethical, legal and social implications, such as attitudes, cooperation and competition, violence, political preference or religious experience. The media, both popular and specialized, has given much room to these new fields, thus underlining how rapidly neuroscientific knowledge spreads beyond the confines of brain research proper into different areas of life and culture as a whole. We provide an overview of these fields, as well as a more focused examination of neuroaesthetics and the “neurodisciplines” of culture. Though recurrently presented as a way of solving centuries-old riddles and offering solutions to supposed crises in the humanities, these new fields apply methods that are intrinsically inadequate to the objects and phenomena they claim to address.

Cultural neuroscience is a research field that investigates the mutual influences of cultural and biological sciences on human behavior. Research in cultural neuroscience demonstrates cultural influences on the neurobiological mechanisms of processes of the mind and behavior. Culture tunes the structure and functional organization of the mind and the nervous system, including processes of emotion, cognition, and social behavior. Environmental and developmental approaches play an important role in the emergence and maintenance of culture. Culture serves as an evolutionary adaptation, protecting organisms from environmental conditions across geography. Cultural variation in the human mind, brain, and behavior serves to build and reinforce culture throughout the life course. This chapter examines the theoretical, methodological, and empirical foundations of cultural neuroscience and its implications for research in population health disparities and global mental health.

Conventional evolutionary biology theory posits that organisms adapt to their environment, and over time, exhibit favorable traits or characteristics that best enable them to survive and reproduce in their given environment, through the process of natural selection. More recently, dual inheritance theory or culture–gene coevolutionary theory has emerged, proposing that cultural traits are adaptive and influence the cultural environment under which genetic selection operates. This chapter examines the role that culture–gene coevolution plays in human empathy and altruism, and how human diversity in the psychological and neurobiological bases of empathy and altruism may arise as a by-product of culture–gene coevolutionary forces. Implications of human diversity in empathic experience and altruistic behavior for understanding intergroup conflict and global variation in macrolevel political systems are discussed.

The last two decades of research have established substantial cultural variations in cognitive, emotional, and motivational processes along the axis of independent versus interdependent self-construal. It is not clear, however, whether these variations are due to controlled processes such as self-presentation and rule-based behavioral regulation or, alternatively, whether they reflect brain mechanisms that are spontaneously engaged and automatically executed. Here we draw on both behavioral and neuroscientific studies to show that many cultural variations occur through mechanisms that are engaged in early processing; thus they are spontaneous and automatic. We review six domains of psychological processes that are likely mediated by the construal of the self as independent or interdependent. We interpret this evidence within a theoretical framework of cultural task analysis, which holds that culture is composed of a variety of tasks designed to accomplish the culture’s imperatives, such as independence and interdependence. Future research directions are discussed.

Cultural diversity in patterns for understanding and conceptualizing one’s relationships with others may have led to diverse cultural systems for interpreting, thinking, and reasoning about the world. Eastern holistic systems of thought rely on connectedness and relations as a primary way of understanding the world, whereas Western analytic systems of thought rely on discreteness or substansiveness as an epistemological way of thinking. From attention and cognition to social cognitive processes, neural systems have likewise adapted differently across cultural contexts to facilitate divergent systems of social interactions and relations. This chapter reviews recent evidence for cultural influences on neural systems of analytic/holistic thinking, and discusses the relevance of this neuroscientific evidence, such as that from functional magnetic resonance imaging and analysis of event-related potentials, for cultural-psychological theories of holism and dialecticism.

Chapter 1 provides a brief overview of cultural differences in human behavior by giving examples of human behaviors in East Asian and Western societies. It reviews the concept of culture used by psychologists, anthropologists, and philosophers, introduces several dimensions of culture, and emphasizes shared beliefs and behavioral scripts as the key components of culture that influence human behavior. It also reviews cross-cultural psychological research that has revealed differences in multiple cognitive processes including perception, attention, memory, causal attribution, and self-reflection between individuals in East Asian and Western cultures. It gives an overview of cultural neuroscience studies that employ brain imaging techniques to reveal neural mechanisms underlying cultural differences in human behavior and mental processes.