Daniel already posted a link to this announcement in his recent biography of Rebecca Seligman, but Prof. Joan Chiao of Northwestern University has asked if I could make sure that the announcement gets out. Prof. Chiao is editing a special edition of Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience (SCAN) on cultural neuroscience, and the call for papers can be found here. The announcement describes:

The aims of the Special Issue on Cultural Neuroscience are two-fold. The first aim is to highlight recent empirical advances using human neuroscience and population genotyping techniques to investigate how culture influences neurobiological processes underlying a wide range of human abilities, from perception and scene processing to memory, emotion and social cognition, as well as how genetic and neural processes give rise to culture. The second aim is to review the theoretical and methodological issues with integrating anthropology, cultural psychology, human neuroscience and population genotyping approaches to the study of cultural neuroscience. By providing examples of the different kinds of bidirectional interactions between cultural, neural and genetic processes across multiple time scales (e.g., phylogeny, ontogeny, situation), the collection of articles in this special issue will serve to highlight the promise and progress of cultural neuroscience research.

We’ll be watching for the special edition, but in the meantime, if you’re interested, Dr. Chiao’s work can be found in a number of places (her website at Northwestern U.) but the easiest way to get it is through the website of the Social and Cultural Neuroscience Lab. The list of papers is extensive, but I particularly liked:

Chiao, Joan Y. and Nalini Ambady. 2007. Cultural Neuroscience: Parsing Universality and Diversity across Levels of Analysis. In Handbook of Cultural Psychology. S. Kitayama and D. Cohen, eds. Pp. 237-254. New York: Guilford Press. (download the pdf here)

Chiao, Joan Y., Zhang Li and Tokiko Harada. 2008 (forthcoming). Cultural Neuroscience of Consciousness: From Visual Perception to Self-Awareness. Journal of Consciousness Studies 15(10-11). (download the pdf here)

If you’re out there sitting on the ‘next big thing’ in cultural neuroscience, you should surf over to the SCAN special issue announcement and submit an abstract for review.