cross-cultural psychology

n. Cross-cultural psychology is the systematic study of how cultural contexts differ and how these differences relate to human development, behavior, and cognitive and emotional processes. Psychologists have often assumed that the processes they identify are basic to being human. Cross-cultural psychology seeks to identify processes that are universal across humankind and those that vary across cultural contexts. In addition, cross-cultural psychology aims to explore relationships between (individual-level) psychological variables and (culture-level) sociocultural, ecological, and biological variables. Researchers do both in-depth studies of particular cultural groups and comparative studies across diverse groups, frequently including national or ethnic groups. Applied fields that the crosscultural perspective has particularly enriched include immigration, intergroup relations, culturally appropriate psychotherapy, education, and industrial/organizational psychology. A special challenge for the field is to develop methods that cope with the problems of equivalence in the meaning of experiments, surveys, personality questionnaires, and so on, in comparative studies.