Search

Cultural factors, such as cultural group membership, have been shown to affect neural bases of face and emotion perception. However, little is known about how cultural factors influence neural processing of emotional faces expressed by in-group and out-group members. In this study, we examined cultural influences on neural activation during the intergroup perception of negative emotional faces. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to compare neural activation during intergroup emotion processing across cultures in three participants groups; two monocultural groups (i.e. Caucasian-Americans and native Japanese) and a bicultural group (i.e. Japanese-Americans). During scanning, the participants completed an emotional match-to-sample task consisting of negative facial expressions of Japanese and Caucasians. Our results show cultural modulation of neural response in the bilateral amygdala as a function of in-group biases and collectivistic values. Additionally, bicultural Japanese-Americans showed enhanced neural responses in the ventral medial prefrontal and posterior cingulate cortices, which had been related to self-related processing, during the perception of negative facial expression of Japanese. Neural activation in the ventral and posterior cingulate cortices reflected individuals' collectivistic tendencies only in the Japanese-American group, possibly due to greater sensitivity to ingroup biases in bicultural individuals. Our results demonstrate the influence of culture on neural responses during the perception of intergroup emotion from faces., (Copyright © 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Individualism and collectivism refer to cultural values that influence how people construe themselves and their relation to the world. Individualists perceive themselves as stable entities, autonomous from other people and their environment, while collectivists view themselves as dynamic entities, continually defined by their social context and relationships. Despite rich understanding of how individualism and collectivism influence social cognition at a behavioral level, little is known about how these cultural values modulate neural representations underlying social cognition. Using cross-cultural functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we examined whether the cultural values of individualism and collectivism modulate neural activity within medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) during processing of general and contextual self judgments. Here, we show that neural activity within the anterior rostral portion of the MPFC during processing of general and contextual self judgments positively predicts how individualistic or collectivistic a person is across cultures. These results reveal two kinds of neural representations of self (eg, a general self and a contextual self) within MPFC and demonstrate how cultural values of individualism and collectivism shape these neural representations., (2008 Wiley-Liss, Inc.)