Cultural Psychology

<em>Cultural Psychology </em>draws upon major psychological topics theories and principles to illustrate the importance of culture in psychological inquiry. Exploring how culture broadly connects to psychological processing across diverse cultural communities and settings it highlights the applied nature of cultural psychology to everyday life events and situations presenting culture as a complex layer in which individuals acquire skills values and abilities. <p/>Two central positions guide this textbook: one that culture is a mental and physical construct that individuals live experience share perform and learn; and the second that culture shapes growth and development. Culture-specific and cross-cultural examples highlight connections between culture and psychological phenomena. The text is multidisciplinary highlighting different perspectives that also study how culture shapes human phenomena. Topics include an introduction to cultural psychology the history of cultural psychology cultural evolution and cultural ecology methods language and nonverbal communication cognition and perception. Through coverage of social behaviour the book challenges students to explore the self identity and personality; social relationships social attitudes and intergroup contact in a global world; and social influence aggression violence and war. Sections addressing growth and development include human development and its processes transitions and rituals across the lifespan and socializing agents socialization practices and child activities. Additionally the book features discussions of emotion and motivation mental health and psychopathology and future directions for cultural psychology. Chapters contain teaching and learning tools including case studies multidisciplinary contributions thought-provoking questions class and experiential activities chapter summaries and additional print and media resources.<br>