title: Culture modulates the brain response to human expressions of emotion: electrophysiological evidence.
abstract: To understand how culture modulates on-line neural responses to social information, this study compared how individuals from two distinct cultural groups, English-speaking North Americans and Chinese, process emotional meanings of multi-sensory stimuli as indexed by both behaviour (accuracy) and event-related potential (N400) measures. In an emotional Stroop-like task, participants were presented face-voice pairs expressing congruent or incongruent emotions in conditions where they judged the emotion of one modality while ignoring the other (face or voice focus task). Results indicated that while both groups were sensitive to emotional differences between channels (with lower accuracy and higher N400 amplitudes for incongruent face-voice pairs), there were marked group differences in how intruding facial or vocal cues affected accuracy and N400 amplitudes, with English participants showing greater interference from irrelevant faces than Chinese. Our data illuminate distinct biases in how adults from East Asian versus Western cultures process socio-emotional cues, supplying new evidence that cultural learning modulates not only behaviour, but the neurocognitive response to different features of multi-channel emotion expressions.
authors.affiliation: School of Communication Sciences and Disorders, McGill University, Montréal, Québec, Canada. Electronic address: pan.liu@mail.mcgill.ca.
authors.forename: Pan
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.affiliation: International Laboratory for Brain, Music and Sound Research (BRAMS), Centre for Research on Brain, Language, and Music (CRBLM), McGill University, Montréal, Québec, Canada.
authors.forename: Simon
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Rigoulot
authors.affiliation: School of Communication Sciences and Disorders, McGill University, Montréal, Québec, Canada; International Laboratory for Brain, Music and Sound Research (BRAMS), Centre for Research on Brain, Language, and Music (CRBLM), McGill University, Montréal, Québec, Canada.
authors.forename: Marc D
authors.initials: MD
authors.lastname: Pell
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001921:Brain / Q000502:physiology*; D002681:China; D003431:Cross-Cultural Comparison; D004644:Emotions / Q000502:physiology*; D005071:Evoked Potentials; D005149:Facial Expression; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D012938:Social Perception; D013067:Speech Perception; D014481:United States; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Cross-cultural studies; ERP; Emotional prosody; Facial expression; Stroop