Research Topics
The research conducted in this lab is primarily focused in three areas:
The Cultural Psychology of Money
In the usual activities of everyday life, the form in which money occurs is generally taken for granted. We will explore how culture shapes the manner in which money is used in various formats, stored in various locations (partly based on existing formats), and put to a variety of uses within and beyond social networks. We do this by studying what happens to people’s money behavioral repertoires when the form of money is changed due to central bank decree ( as in a currency redenomination) or due to technological innovation (such as market launching of card-based and cell-phone based payment platforms). Theoretically, this work attempts to understand how cognitive processes (such numerosity and materiality effects, value relearning, and price rescaling) and cultural nuances (such as political and social representations of value) influence changes in money behavior.
Culture and Emotion
The core questions driving the lab’s work on Culture and Emotion are: Are African experiences in emotion culturally particular? If so, how and why? We examine the extent to which internal interoceptive and external social considerations are salient in the experience, expression, and performance of emotion in African settings, and how these influences differ from Western settings. The approach of Culture and Emotion research in this lab combines psychological approaches with those of emotionology (humanities-style emotion work that attends to historical and cultural context).
Mental health and Wellbeing
Work in this area is broadly related to mental health, focusing on the background of cultural beliefs, practices, and conditions in which problems of living and psychopathology develop in Ghanaian settings. Recognising that life in contemporary Africa is impacted by traditional and globalization influences, a central theme of the work in this area is mapping out the relevance of each of these in contemporary understandings of mental health, wellbeing, and associated factors (such as worldview, social relationships, and help seeking). Current work in the Mental Health area includes a collaboration that seeks to conceptually map out local constructions of wellbeing in southern Ghana.