title: Cultural differences in sensitivity to social context: detecting affective incongruity using the N400.
abstract: East Asians and Asian-Americans tend to allocate relatively greater attention to background context compared to European Americans across a variety of cognitive and neural measures. We sought to extend these findings of cultural differences to affective stimuli using the N400, which has been shown to be sensitive to deep processing of affective information. The degree to which Asian-Americans and European Americans responded to semantic incongruity between emotionally expressive faces (i.e., smiling or frowning) and background affective scenes was measured. As predicted, Asian-Americans showed a greater N400 to incongruent trials than to congruent trials. In contrast, European Americans showed no difference in amplitude across the two conditions. Furthermore, greater affective N400 incongruity was associated with higher interdependent self-construals. These data suggest that Asian-Americans and those with interdependent self-construals process the relationship between perceived facial emotion and affective background context to a greater degree than European Americans and those with independent self-construals. Implications for neural and cognitive differences in everyday social interactions, and cultural differences in analytic and holistic thinking are discussed.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Pomona College, Claremont, CA 91711, USA. sgoto@pomona.edu
authors.forename: Sharon G
authors.initials: SG
authors.lastname: Goto
authors.forename: Alicia
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Yee
authors.forename: Kelly
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Lowenberg
authors.forename: Richard S
authors.initials: RS
authors.lastname: Lewis
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001213:Asian / Q000523:psychology; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D001931:Brain Mapping; D003431:Cross-Cultural Comparison; D003469:Culture; D004569:Electroencephalography; D004644:Emotions / Q000502:physiology*; D005071:Evoked Potentials / Q000502:physiology; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007398:Interpersonal Relations; D008297:Male; D012931:Social Environment; D044465:White People / Q000523:psychology; D055815:Young Adult