A Call for Greater Attention to Culture in the Study of Brain and Development

Abstract

Despite growing research on neurobiological development, little attention has been paid to cultural and ethnic variation in neurodevelopmental processes. We present an overview of the current state of developmental cognitive neuroscience with respect to its attention to cultural issues. Analyses based on 80 publications represented in five recent meta-analyses related to adolescent developmental neuroscience show that 99% of the publications used samples in Western countries. Only 22% of studies provided a detailed description of participants’ racial/ethnic background, and only 18% provided for socioeconomic status. Results reveal a trend in developmental cognitive neuroscience research: The body of research is derived not only mostly from Western samples but also from participants whose race/ethnicity is unknown. To achieve a holistic perspective on brain development in different cultural contexts, we propose and highlight an emerging interdisciplinary approach—developmental cultural neuroscience—the intersection of developmental psychology, cultural psychology, and cognitive neuroscience. Developmental cultural neuroscience aims to elucidate cultural similarities and differences in neural processing across the life span. We call attention to the importance of incorporating culture into the empirical investigation of neurodevelopment.

How diverse are the samples used to study intimate relationships? A systematic review

“…Samples in studies of intimate relationships were overwhelmingly drawn from Western countries, with 73% stemming from the United States and an additional 22% coming from other Western countries, while only 5% came from Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Israel combined. This is in line with the meta-science literature, which consistently finds that more than 90% of samples are drawn from Western, industrialized nations (Arnett, 2008;Nielsen et al, 2017;Qu et al, 2020). Additionally, participants in U.S.based studies of intimate relationships were overwhelmingly likely to be White, consistent with participant demographics in other areas of psychology (Nielsen et al, 2017;Qu et al, 2020).…”

“…With regard to socioeconomic status, a few other meta-science studies did attempt to examine income, but concluded that so few studies reported this information that they were unable to draw any inferences about the socioeconomic makeup of participants (Qu et al, 2020;Rad et al, 2018). We also found a high degree of missing income data (76%) but due to the very large corpus of studies included in our review we did have enough data to analyze participant income levels.…”

“…Accordingly, examining psychological phenomena across diverse participants is necessary to determine which aspects are universal and which are culturally-construed (Apicella et al, 2020). Recently, multiple meta-science studies have examined subfields of psychological science to assess the current state of diversity and inclusion, and inform efforts to improve representativeness of study participants within that field (Nielsen et al, 2017;Pollet & Saxton, 2019;Qu et al, 2020). The scientific study of romantic relationships is one area of inquiry that has not yet been scrutinized, yet is ripe for examination of the diversity of participants.…”

“…First, our results describing participant demographics are incomplete because of the large amount of missing data. Poor reporting of participant demographics is common across psychological science (DeJesus et al, 2019;Qu et al, 2020;Rad et al, 2018), and is arguably a bigger problem than reliance on nondiverse samples because the provenance of the results is completely unknown, rather than known to originate in a specific, majority group. Due to this missing data issue, our results are reflective only of the subset of studies that reported participant demographics and not of the entire corpus of studies included in the review.…”

Infants are sensitive to cultural differences in emotions at 11 months

“…Greater attention to culture has been called for in developmental research [ 102 ]. The current study demonstrates 11-month-old infants’ sensitivity to differences in culture-specific emotional expressions when combined with differences in racial appearance, but that this sensitivity is more apparent for anger and surprise (novelty effect) than for happiness (familiarity effect).…”