Anthropologists

Psychological anthropology is a highly interdiscplinary field that studies the interaction of culture and mental processes. In particular, psychological anthropologists tend to focus on ways in which humans' development and enculturation within a particular cultural group, with its own history, language, practices, and conceptual categories, shape processes of human cognition, emotion, perception, motivation, and mental health. Psychological anthropologists tend to differ from social psychologists in that the latter are more concerned with general features of human interaction within social groups, rather than the historically and culturally specific effects of being socialized within a particular group; they differ from cultural psychologists in generally being more concerned with elucidating cultural models and in looking at effects in daily life, rather than specifically cognitive differences detectable in laboratory situations. These differences are often more in emphasis than strict distinctions.