Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary, scientific study of the mind and its processes. It examines the nature, the tasks, and the functions of cognition. Mental faculties of concern to cognitive scientists include language, perception, memory, attention, reasoning, and emotion; to understand these faculties, cognitive scientists borrow from fields such as linguistics, psychology, artificial intelligence, philosophy, neuroscience, and anthropology. The typical analysis of cognitive science spans many levels of organization, from learning and decision to logic and planning; from neural circuitry to modular brain organization. One of the fundamental concepts of cognitive science is that "thinking can best be understood in terms of representational structures in the mind and computational procedures that operate on those structures."
Emotions are physical and mental states brought on by neurophysiological changes, variously associated with thoughts, feelings, behavioral responses, and a degree of pleasure or displeasure. There is no scientific consensus on a definition. Emotions are often intertwined with mood, temperament, personality, disposition, or creativity.
Organizational culture refers to culture related to organizations including schools, universities, not-for-profit groups, government agencies, and business entities. Alternative terms include corporate culture and company culture. The term corporate culture emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It was used by managers, sociologists, and organizational theorists in the 1980s.
Cross-cultural communication is a field of study investigating how people from differing cultural backgrounds communicate, in similar and different ways among themselves, and how they endeavor to communicate across cultures. Intercultural communication is a related field of study.
Intercultural communication is a discipline that studies communication across different cultures and social groups, or how culture affects communication. It describes the wide range of communication processes and problems that naturally appear within an organization or social context made up of individuals from different religious, social, ethnic, and educational backgrounds. In this sense, it seeks to understand how people from different countries and cultures act, communicate, and perceive the world around them. Intercultural communication focuses on the recognition and respect of those with cultural differences. The goal is mutual adaptation between two or more distinct cultures which leads to biculturalism/multiculturalism rather than complete assimilation. It promotes the development of cultural sensitivity and allows for empathic understanding across different cultures.
Collective memory refers to the shared pool of memories, knowledge and information of a social group that is significantly associated with the group's identity. The English phrase "collective memory" and the equivalent French phrase "la mémoire collective" appeared in the second half of the nineteenth century. The philosopher and sociologist Maurice Halbwachs analyzed and advanced the concept of the collective memory in the book Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire (1925).
In philosophy, psychology, sociology, and anthropology, intersubjectivity is the relation or intersection between people's cognitive perspectives.
Cultural psychology is the study of how cultures reflect and shape their members' psychological processes.
Cultural competence, also known as intercultural competence, is a range of cognitive, affective, behavioural, and linguistic skills that lead to effective and appropriate communication with people of other cultures. Intercultural or cross-cultural education are terms used for the training to achieve cultural competence.
Enactivism is a position in cognitive science that argues that cognition arises through a dynamic interaction between an acting organism and its environment. It claims that the environment of an organism is brought about, or enacted, by the active exercise of that organism's sensorimotor processes. "The key point, then, is that the species brings forth and specifies its own domain of problems ...this domain does not exist "out there" in an environment that acts as a landing pad for organisms that somehow drop or parachute into the world. Instead, living beings and their environments stand in relation to each other through mutual specification or codetermination" (p. 198). "Organisms do not passively receive information from their environments, which they then translate into internal representations. Natural cognitive systems...participate in the generation of meaning ...engaging in transformational and not merely informational interactions: they enact a world." These authors suggest that the increasing emphasis upon enactive terminology presages a new era in thinking about cognitive science. How the actions involved in enactivism relate to age-old questions about free will remains a topic of active debate.
Chronemics is an anthropological, philosophical, and linguistic subdiscipline that describes how time is perceived, coded, and communicated across a given culture. It is one of several subcategories to emerge from the study of nonverbal communication. According to the Encyclopedia of Special Education, "Chronemics includes time orientation, understanding and organisation, the use of and reaction to time pressures, the innate and learned awareness of time, by physically wearing or not wearing a watch, arriving, starting, and ending late or on time." A person's perception and values placed on time plays a considerable role in their communication process. The use of time can affect lifestyles, personal relationships, and work life. Across cultures, people usually have different time perceptions, and this can result in conflicts between individuals. Time perceptions include punctuality, interactions, and willingness to wait.
The Bennett scale, also called the Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity (DMIS), was developed by Milton Bennett. The framework describes the different ways in which people can react to cultural differences. Bennett's initial idea was for trainers to utilize the model to evaluate trainees' intercultural awareness and help them improve intercultural sensitivity, also sometimes referred to as cultural sensitivity, which is the ability of accepting and adapting to a brand new and different culture.
Anxiety/uncertainty management (AUM) theory is known as the high levels of anxiety one may experience as they come in contact with those of another culture. This concept was first introduced by William B. Gudykunst to further define how humans effectively communicate based on their anxiety and uncertainty in social situations. Gudykunst believed that in order for successful intercultural communication a reduction in anxiety/uncertainty must occur. This is assuming that the individuals within the intercultural encounter are strangers. AUM is a theory based on the uncertainty reduction theory (URT) which was introduced by Berger and Calabrese in 1974. URT provides much of the initial framework for AUM, and much like other theories in the communication field AUM is a constantly developing theory, based on the observations of human behaviour in social situations.
Face negotiation theory is a theory conceived by Stella Ting-Toomey in 1985, to understand how people from different cultures manage rapport and disagreements. The theory posited "face", or self-image when communicating with others, as a universal phenomenon that pervades across cultures. In conflicts, one's face is threatened; and thus the person tends to save or restore his or her face. This set of communicative behaviors, according to the theory, is called "facework". Since people frame the situated meaning of "face" and enact "facework" differently from one culture to the next, the theory poses a cross-cultural framework to examine facework negotiation. It is important to note that the definition of face varies depending on the people and their culture and the same can be said for the proficiency of facework. According to Ting-Toomey's theory, most cultural differences can be divided by Eastern and Western cultures, and her theory accounts for these differences.
Cultural sensitivity, also referred to as cross-cultural sensitivity or cultural awareness, is the knowledge, awareness, and acceptance of other cultures and others' cultural identities. It is related to cultural competence, and is sometimes regarded as the precursor to the achievement of cultural competence, but is a more commonly used term. On the individual level, cultural sensitivity is a state of mind regarding interactions with those different from oneself. Cultural sensitivity enables travelers, workers, and others to successfully navigate interactions with a culture other than their own.
Identity management theory is an intercultural communication theory from the 1990s. It was developed by William R. Cupach and Tadasu Todd Imahori on the basis of Erving Goffman's Interaction ritual: Essays on face-to-face behavior (1967). Cupach and Imahori distinguish between intercultural communication and intracultural communication.
In management and organizational studies disciplines, cross-cultural capital (CCC) is the aggregate set of knowledge, skills, abilities and psychological dispositions that gives individuals competitive advantage in interacting, working, and managing in culturally diverse environments. It is considered a facet of human capital.
Cross-cultural psychology attempts to understand how individuals of different cultures interact with each other. Along these lines, cross-cultural leadership has developed as a way to understand leaders who work in the newly globalized market. Today's international organizations require leaders who can adjust to different environments quickly and work with partners and employees of other cultures. It cannot be assumed that a manager who is successful in one country will be successful in another.
Culture and social cognition is the relationship between human culture and human cognitive capabilities. Cultural cognitive evolution proposes that humans’ unique cognitive capacities are not solely due to biological inheritance, but are in fact due in large part to cultural transmission and evolution. Modern humans and great apes are separated evolutionarily by about six million years. Proponents of cultural evolution argue that this would not have been enough time for humans to develop the advanced cognitive capabilities required to create tools, language, and build societies through biological evolution. Biological evolution could not have individually produced each of these cognitive capabilities within that period of time. Instead, humans must have evolved the capacity to learn through cultural transmission. This provides a more plausible explanation that would fit within the given time frame. Instead of having to biologically account for each cognitive mechanism that distinguishes modern humans from previous relatives, one would only have to account for one significant biological adaptation for cultural learning. According to this view, the ability to learn through cultural transmission is what distinguishes humans from other primates. Cultural learning allows humans to build on existing knowledge and make collective advancements, also known as the “ratchet effect”. The ratchet effect simply refers to the way in which humans continuously add on to existing knowledge through modifications and improvements. This unique ability distinguishes humans from related primates, who do not seem to build collaborative knowledge over time. Instead, primates seem to build individual knowledge, in which the expertise of one animal is not built on by others, and does not progress across time.
Intercultural intelligence, or ICI, is a term that is used for the capability to function effectively in culturally diverse settings and consists of different dimensions which are correlated to effectiveness in global environment. Intercultural intelligence differs from cultural intelligence in that it is based from the belief in interculturalism while CQ is based from the belief in multiculturalism. The term was first used in 2006 in response to the qualities observed in international executives that enabled them to succeed globally.
