Sexuality and the three psychologies of culture

The discipline of psychology has historically integrated the study of culture in distinct ways, resulting in three ‘psychologies of culture’ articulated at the turn of the twenty-first century: cultural psychology, cross-cultural psychology, and indigenous psychology. This commentary examines how articles in the special issue engage with these distinct paradigms. We note that most contributions to the special issue considered the culture concept in relatively static ways consistent with cross-cultural psychology’s emphasis on culture as an antecedent or independent variable. The goals of the contributions were aligned both with cross-cultural psychology’s concern with exploration and cultural psychology’s concern with meaning‑making and understanding. While some articles integrated concepts from indigenous psychology, no contributions claimed to be documenting a particular indigenous psychology of sexuality. We note that no contributions situated themselves directly within any of these three paradigms, which likely reflects the absence of attention to sexuality in the original paradigmatic statements of the three psychologies of culture. We conclude by calling for a more clearly articulated paradigm within psychology to guide empirical work on cultural diversity in sexuality at a time of heightened intercultural contact.