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Cultural neuroscience research examines how psychological processes are affected by the interplay between culture and biological factors, including genetic influences, patterns of neural activation, and physiological processes. In this review, we present foundational and current empirical research in this area, and we also discuss theories that aim to explain how various aspects of the social environment are interpreted as meaningful in different cultures and interact with a cascade of biological processes to ultimately influence thoughts and behaviors. This review highlights theoretical and methodological issues, potential solutions, and future implications for a field that aspires to integrate the complexities of human biology with the richness of culture.

This article provides a review of how cultural contexts shape and are shaped by psychological and neurobiological processes. We propose a framework that aims to culturally contextualize behavioral, genetic, neural, and physiological processes. Empirical evidence is presented to offer concrete examples of how neurobiological processes underlie social behaviors, and how these components are interconnected in larger cultural contexts. These findings provide some understanding of how the meanings shared by cultural experiences trigger a neurobiological, psychological, and behavioral chain of events, and how these events may be coordinated and maintained within a person. The review concludes with a reflection on the current state of cultural neuroscience and questions for the field to address.

East Asians often define their ingroups based on preexisting social relationships (e.g., friends, family), whereas North Americans define their ingroups largely based on broader social categories (e.g., race, nationality; Brewer & Yuki, 2007). In the present research we examined the consequences of this cultural difference for own-group face recognition biases. In Study 1, European Canadians and first-generation East Asian Canadians were assigned to minimal groups. Consistent with previous findings, European Canadians showed superior memory for own-group faces; however, as expected, first-generation East Asian Canadians did not. In Study 2, using university affiliation as the experimentally manipulated social group, European Canadians again showed superior memory for own-group faces, whereas first-generation East Asian Canadians did not. The results are consistent with current theorizing and suggest that the effect of mere social categorization on face recognition is moderated by culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]