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A groundbreaking investigation into the hidden mental health effects of border walls, revealing the harm they bring to all who live near them. Today, there are at least seventy border walls: from the US-Mexico border to the seventeen thousand miles of barbed wire that wall off Bangladesh from India, as well as the five-layer fence between Saudi Arabia and Iraq. Border walls protect us, the argument goes, because they keep danger out. But what if the walls themselves endanger everyone who lives...

Cultures of Infancy presents the first systematic analysis of culturally informed developmental pathways, synthesizing evolutionary and cultural psychological perspectives for a broader understanding of human development. In this compelling book, author Heidi Keller utilizes ethnographic reports, as well as quantitative and qualitative analyses, to illustrate how humans resolve universal developmental tasks in particular sociodemographic contexts. These contexts are represented in cultural model...

Life cycle and the events that characterize it - childhood, adolescence, work, couple formation, child birth, retirement, old age, departure from life - as seen through the eyes of the anthropologist that examines the cultural models and their mode of transmission between generations, and of psychologist, which focuses on the dynamics more or less conscious that work within families and the individual. A book written using clear and concise language, aimed not so much to communicate certainties...

Winner of the 2019 ASA Book Award - Asia/Asian-American Section Between Foreign and Family explores the impact of inconsistent rules of ethnic inclusion and exclusion on the economic and social lives of Korean Americans and Korean Chinese living in Seoul. These actors are part of a growing number of return migrants, members of an ethnic diaspora who migrate “back” to the ancestral homeland from which their families emigrated. Drawing on ethnographic observations and interview data, Helene K. Le...

Understanding and promoting agency are crucial to addressing urgent social problems of our time. Through agency, we can take transformative steps toward the future that ought to be. This book shows how contemporary conceptualizations from cultural-historical activity theory can inform research and practice that fosters positive change. At the core of this book's novel approach to agency and transformation are three motifs: motives, mediation, and motion. These take inspiration from the original...

Psychology has a WEIRD problem. It is overly reliant on participants from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic societies. Over the last decade this problem has come to be widely acknowledged, yet there has been little progress toward making psychology more diverse. This Element proposes that the lack of progress can be explained by the fact that the original WEIRD critique was too narrow in scope. Rather than a single problem of a lack of diversity among research participants,...

Can psychoanalytical hypotheses have a universal value? Can they describe the same – or a similar – psychic dynamic for any human, regardless of the historical, social and cultural context? Can psychoanalysis help with mental suffering in different realities? In our times, the questions psychoanalysis has to face are very complex. The modern world is dominated by technology that subverts the perception of the body, by new families and group organization, and by a global violence that enforces a...

What Americans Build and Why examines five areas of Americans' built environment: houses, healthcare facilities, schools, workplaces, and shopping environments. Synthesizing information from both academic journals and the popular press, the book looks at the relationships of size and scale to the way Americans live their lives and how their way of life is fundamentally shaped by the highway system, cheap land, and incentives. This book is timely because although Americans say they crave communit...

Humans are a fundamentally social species. As individuals, we construct our identity through our affiliation, interaction, and identification with larger groups. And in diverse and multiethnic societies like ours, ethnic identity takes on an especially profound importance. In recent years, social scientists have been increasingly studying the meaning, process, and content of ethnic identity, but these efforts have been piecemeal, and the field as a whole has suffered from a lack of conceptual cl...

Multicultural psychology is a vibrant, emerging discipline with great potential to inform therapists about cultural considerations relevant to mental health. But to what extent are existing assumptions about culturally-informed practice based on research evidence? This book brings clarity to the current evidence base, shifting the conversation toward greater inclusion of cultural factors in psychotherapy and helping those conversations become more reliant on data than on opinion. Using meta-an...

This publication, written for program leaders and practitioners, examines how culture shapes children's fundamental learning about themselves, their emotions, and their way of interacting and relating to others. Recommendations for providing culturally responsive services are included, as is an explanation of cultural reciprocity a framework for resolving cultural dilemmas. Numerous activities featuring a range of infant-family settings are provided as well.

An overview is given of cross-cultural psychology and cultural psychology, focusing on theory and methodology. In Section 1 historical developments in research are traced; it is found that initially extensive psychological differences tend to shrink when more carefully designed studies are conducted. Section 2 addresses the conceptualization of “culture” and of “a culture”. For psychological research the notion “culture” is considered too vague; more focal explanatory concepts are required. Sect...

This volume, part of the International Association of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Allied Professions' book series 'Working with Children & Adolescents,' aims to bring up-to-date empirically derived knowledge on transcultural themes as they affect child and adolescent mental adjustment, to assist those seeking to understand and ameliorate the mental health problems of children and young people. The contributors represent expert views supported by empirical and clinical experiences. They a...

Originally published in 1974, this volume is primarily devoted to what is known about human infancy from an ethological, evolutionary viewpoint. Included are discussions of pan-specific traits, presumably shared by all infants; individual genetic variations on these behaviours (as judged by twin-studies); sex differences, presumably shared by infants of all ethnic groups; and genetically based ethnic differences. However, the author favours neither biological determinism nor cultural determinism...

This innovative text is the first to examine the contemporary psychological experience of African Americans through the lens of a positive, strengths-based model. It combats the deficit perspective that has permeated the psychological literature about African Americans by focusing on the strengths that have facilitated their growth and resilience—while also considering existing challenges and struggles. The author examines in depth the major areas of psychological research across family, peer,...