Joan Chiao and Shinobu Kitayama Announce International Cultural Neuroscience Consortium

 

“We are pleased to announce the development of the international cultural neuroscience consortium (ICNC). The goal of the ICNC is to build an interdisciplinary, international research network in cultural neuroscience.

In the next few years, we look forward to developing working groups, offer travel grants for speakers and students at conferences as well as an online website to connect researchers from interdisciplinary communities and facilitate collaborations in cultural neuroscience to study population health disparities and public policy in global context.

We are grateful for your support to develop the ICNC as well as your continued involvement in the ICNC activities. To further this initiative, we look forward to your responses to an online survey that will help us create research and teaching connections and an active database scholars and policymakers across diverse communities and cultures.

http://kellogg.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_bwm41kUU0e3VCzG

Please feel free to distribute widely to your students, friends and colleagues and we look forward to receiving your suggestions by early November!”

 

via thefpr.org blog

McGill University’s Summer Program in Social and Cultural Psychiatry – May/June 2011

In 1995, the Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry, Department of Psychiatry, McGill University inaugurated an annual summer school in social and cultural psychiatry and psychiatric epidemiology. The program provides the conceptual background for research and clinical work in social and cultural psychiatry and will be of interest to:

• postdoctoral trainees, researchers, and clinicians in psychiatry and other mental health disciplines
• residents and graduate students in health and social sciences
• physicians, psychologists, social workers and health professionals

The summer program has reached its 17th edition this year, is directed by Laurence J. Kirmayer and will take place from 2nd May – 3rd June 2011. For more information, link here.

University of South Carolina’s 28th Annual Multicultural Symposium: Cultural Neuroscience – April 2011

The Department of Psychology at the University of South Carolina will host its 28th Annual Multicultural Symposium on April 8th. The symposium is organized by the Black Psychology Graduate Student Association. This year’s topic is Cultural Neuroscience: Understanding How Biology & Culture Shape the Mind & Behavior.

Keynote speakers include:

• Dr. Lasana Harris, Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, Duke University (neural correlates of person perception and decision-making)
• Dr. Joan Chiao, Department of Psychology, Northwestern University (psychological and neural processes underlying social behavior and emotion processing)
• Dr. Vivian Ota Wang, National Human Genome Research Institute, National Institutes of Health (genomics and public health)
• Dr. Susan Fiske, Department of Psychology, Princeton University (stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination).

For additional information on the programme and contact information, link here.

via University of South Carolina Psychology Department Chair’s Blog

Experimental Methods in the Study of Cognition and Culture – Course at the Summer University Programme at Aarhus University – August 2011

This year’s Summer University Programme at Aarhus University in Denmark will include an interesting course on “Experimental Methods in the Study of Cognition and Culture”.

Description: What can cognition and brain function tell us about cultural forms? And how does culture impinge on cognitive processing and brain functions? The interface between culture on the one hand, and cognition and brain science on the other is a fast-developing research area attracting numerous scholars and scientists with different backgrounds. Neuroscientists, psychologists, sociologists, economists, anthropologists, and humanists of various sorts seek to find out how evolved cognitive capacities, cultural learning and social and institutional forms interact to constrain, or even produce, human behavior. Such interdisciplinary work not only calls for a high degree of translatability between terminologies found in each individual discipline. It further calls for knowledge about, and experience with, different methodologies.

2nd Summer Institute in Cultural Neuroscience – July 2011

The Center for Culture, Mind and the Brain, CCMB at the University of Michigan, will be hosting its second Summer Institute for Cultural Neuroscience (SICN) from July 18-20, 2011. The event is organized by Shinobu Kitayama, Director of the CCMB and Carolyn Yoon, Associate Professor at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan.

The SICN has a great line up of leading researchers on this field such as Shinobu Kitayama, Joan Chiao, Daphna Oyserman, Denise Park and Adreas Roepstorff.

CCMB Annual Conference – April 16, 2011

The Center for Culture, Mind, and the Brain (CCMB) at the University of Michigan has recently announced the second annual one-day conference on “Culture, Mind, and the Brain”.

WHEN?

The conference is scheduled for April 16th at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Submissions for oral presentations are due on February 11, 2011.

The What, Why and How of Cultural Neuroscience – Part 1: What is Cultural Neuroscience?

What is Cultural Neuroscience?

The term “cultural neuroscience” was coined by Joan Chiao, a former graduate student of Nalini Ambady at Harvard University. It describes an emerging interdisciplinary field focused on investigating the multidirectional interactions between culture, mind, genes and the brain (Chiao & Ambady, 2007 in the Handbook of Cultural Psychology, edited by Kitayama and Cohen). The relationship is not assumed to be unidirectional because cultural practices adapt to neurobiological constraints on the one hand and human neurobiology adapts to cultural experience on the other (Ambady & Bharucha, 2009).