Cultural Neuroscience

Cultural neuroscience is a field of research that studies the interrelation between a person's cultural environment and neurobiological systems, drawing on anthropology, psychology and cognitive neuroscience to examine sociocultural influences on human behavior. Researchers typically measure these effects using neuroimaging methods that reveal cross-cultural variability in neural activity, studying cultural variation in mental, neural and genomic processes to understand how cultural traits such as values, beliefs and practices shape neurobiology and behavior, and how neurobiological mechanisms in turn help transmit cultural traits. It integrates theory and methods from cultural psychology, neuroscience and neurogenetics to demonstrate this bidirectional interaction between culture and biology, sharing research aims with related interdisciplinary fields such as social neuroscience and neuroanthropology, and its findings carry practical relevance to transcultural psychiatry and to broader public policy questions such as population health disparities and immigration.