PSYC 242: Cultural Psychology (HC) Fall 2017

Choosing a topic can be one of the toughest hurdles to get over.

First, gather ideas from psychology encyclopedias (see below), your textbook, or simply Google "topics in cultural psychology". 

Start with something broad and then choose just one particular aspect of that broad topic so it is manageable.

e.g., You are interested in whether different cultures experience emotions differently, but that is a huge topic! Possible aspects of this topic are:

• Are facial expressions universal across cultures?
• Why do some cultures have more emotion words than others?
• Do some cultures experience happiness more than others?

Use the general resources below, as well as Google, Wikipedia, and cursory database searches, to familiarize yourself with your topic and come up with potential search words.

These portals are gateways to rich sources of reference material, too numerous to mention individually by title. Click on the link to explore.

Within the library catalog (Tripod), there are many subject encyclopedias useful for gathering concise, authoritative background information on unfamiliar topics. It is straight forward to find them by searching keywords composed of the topic plus the word encyclopedia. Example: personality (handbook* OR encyclopedia*). * is the wildcard symbol that stands in for multiple characters of any kind. In this example we are simply capturing the plurals.