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cultural psychology

an interdisciplinary extension of general psychology concerned with those psychological processes that are inherently organized by culture. It is a heterogeneous class of perspectives that focus on explaining how human psychological functions are culturally constituted through various forms of relations between people and their social contexts. As a discipline, cultural psychology relates to cultural anthropology, sociology, semiotics, language philosophy, and culture studies. Within psychology, it relates most closely to cultural, social, developmental, and cognitive issues. See also cross-cultural psychology; ethnic psychology.

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Psychology term of the day

January 14th 2025

Kruskal–Shepard scaling

Kruskal–Shepard scaling

a type of multidimensional scaling applied to judgments of similarity or dissimilarity for pairs of items (e.g., cities). The dissimilarities are represented by distances between items in a highly dimensional space: Larger distances indicate greater dissimilarity. [William Henry Kruskal (1919–2005), U.S. statistician; Roger N. Shepard (1929–  ), U.S. experimental and cognitive psychologist]