Development of an international cultural neuroscience consortium

描述（由申请人提供）：到2050年，近五分之一的美国人（19%）将是移民，包括西班牙裔，黑人和亚洲人，而2005年为八分之一（12%）（皮尤研究中心，2008）。先前的研究表明，少数民族和种族群体之间普遍存在人口心理健康差异。政治经济研究联合中心（2009年）估计，消除种族/少数民族健康差异将使美国仅在2003年至2006年期间就减少与疾病和过早死亡相关的间接成本超过1万亿美元。考虑到美国文化多样性的增加以及不同文化群体之间代价高昂的人口健康差异的存在，必须更深入地了解文化如何影响不同社区心理健康的基本心理和生物机制，以及如何将文化和健康方面的基础研究转化为应用环境，以减少人口健康差异，质量和获得疾病治疗的机会。 拟议赠款的目标是实施一系列科学会议和基础设施举措，以创建跨学科的基本行为和社会科学家团队，采用文化神经科学方法来解决文化和健康的核心问题，特别是全球心理健康和人口心理健康差异。我们的目标是创建和维持一个国际，跨学科的科学家社区，这将允许加速，扩大和加强文化神经科学的新兴领域的调查范围，以及增加文化神经科学的理论，方法和分析方法的复杂性。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): By 2050, nearly one in five Americans (19%) will be an immigrant, including Hispanics, Blacks and Asians, compared with one in eight (12%) in 2005 (Pew Research Center, 2008). Prior research indicates the prevalence of population mental health disparities across ethnic and racial minority groups. The Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies (2009) estimates that eliminating racial/ethnic minority health disparities would have reduced indirect costs in the United States associated with illness and premature death by more than $1 trillion between 2003 and 2006 alone. Given this increase in cultural diversity within the United States and the existence of costly population health disparities across cultural groups, it is essential to develop a more sophisticated understanding of how culture affects basic psychological and biological mechanisms underlying mental health across diverse communities as well as how such basic research in culture and health can be translated in applied settings to reduce population health disparities in quality and access to treatment for illness. The goal of the proposed grant is to implement a series of scientific meetings and infrastructural initiatives to create interdisciplinary teams of basic behavioral and social scientists that adopt a cultural neuroscience approach to addressing questions central to culture and health, particularly global mental health and population mental health disparities. Our goal is to create and sustain an international, interdisciplinary community of scientists that will allow for the acceleration, expansion, and strengthening of the scope of investigation in the emerging field of cultural neuroscience as well as to increase the sophistication of theoretical, methodological, and analytical approaches in cultural neuroscience.