| Summary: | In this article I explore the hypothesis that modern East Asian populations inherited andmaintained extensive psycho-social adaptations to arctic environments from ancestral NortheastAsian populations, which inhabited arctic and subarctic North Eurasia during the latePleistocene, prior to migrating southwards into East Asia in the Holocene. I present the firstcross-cultural comparison between modern East Asian and Inuit populations, using the latter asa model for paleolithic Arctic populations. The comparison reveals that both East Asians and theInuit exhibit high emotional control/suppression, ingroup harmony/cohesion, indirectness, selfand social consciousness, reserve/introversion, cautiousness, and perseverance/stoicendurance. The same traits have been identified by decades of research in polar psychology(i.e., psychological research on workers, expeditioners, and military personnel living andworking in the Arctic and Antarctic) as being crucial for thriving in polar environments. Iinterpret this as indirect evidence supporting my hypothesis that the proposed Arcticist traits,which are present in modern East Asian and Inuit populations, represent adaptations to polarclimates. I conclude the paper by re-examining previous theories on the roots of Easternpsychology in the light of my Arcticism theory.
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