Spontaneous attention to word content versus emotional tone: differences among three cultures.
A Stroop interference task was used to test the hypothesis that people in different cultures are differentially attuned to verbal content vis-à-vis vocal tone in comprehending emotional words. In Study 1, Americans showed greater difficulty ignoring verbal content than ignoring vocal tone (which reveals an attentional bias for verbal content); but Japanese showed greater difficulty ignoring vocal tone than ignoring verbal content (which reveals a bias for vocal tone). In Study 2, Tagalog-English bilinguals in the Philippines showed an attentional bias for vocal tone regardless of the language used, suggesting that the effect is largely cultural rather than linguistic. Implications for culture-and-cognition research are discussed.
Ishii
Keiko
K
Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan, ishii@let.hokudai.ac.jp
Reyes
Jose Alberto
JA
Kitayama
Shinobu
S
D000328:Adult; D000339:Affect / Q000502:physiology*; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D003431:Cross-Cultural Comparison; D003469:Culture; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011930:Reaction Time; D012660:Semantics; D013067:Speech Perception; D014825:Vocabulary