title: Culture shapes 7-month-olds' perceptual strategies in discriminating facial expressions of emotion.
abstract: Emotional facial expressions are thought to have evolved because they play a crucial role in species' survival. From infancy, humans develop dedicated neural circuits [1] to exhibit and recognize a variety of facial expressions [2]. But there is increasing evidence that culture specifies when and how certain emotions can be expressed - social norms - and that the mature perceptual mechanisms used to transmit and decode the visual information from emotional signals differ between Western and Eastern adults [3-5]. Specifically, the mouth is more informative for transmitting emotional signals in Westerners and the eye region for Easterners [4], generating culture-specific fixation biases towards these features [5]. During development, it is recognized that cultural differences can be observed at the level of emotional reactivity and regulation [6], and to the culturally dominant modes of attention [7]. Nonetheless, to our knowledge no study has explored whether culture shapes the processing of facial emotional signals early in development. The data we report here show that, by 7 months, infants from both cultures visually discriminate facial expressions of emotion by relying on culturally distinct fixation strategies, resembling those used by the adults from the environment in which they develop [5].
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Lancaster University, Bailrigg, Lancaster LA1 4YF, UK.
authors.forename: Elena
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Geangu
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Chuo University, Hachioji-city, Tokyo, 192-0393, Japan; Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo, 102-0083, Japan; Current affiliation: Faculty of Science and Technology, Tokyo University of Science, Yamazaki 2641, Noda, 278-8510, Chiba, Japan.
authors.forename: Hiroko
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Ichikawa
authors.affiliation: Eye and Brain Mapping Laboratory (iBMLab), Department of Psychology, University of Fribourg, Faucigny 2, 1700 Fribourg, Switzerland.
authors.forename: Junpeng
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Lao
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Japan Women's University, Kawasaki, Kanagawa, 214- 8565, Japan.
authors.forename: So
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Kanazawa
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Chuo University, Hachioji-city, Tokyo, 192-0393, Japan.
authors.forename: Masami K
authors.initials: MK
authors.lastname: Yamaguchi
authors.affiliation: Eye and Brain Mapping Laboratory (iBMLab), Department of Psychology, University of Fribourg, Faucigny 2, 1700 Fribourg, Switzerland. Electronic address: roberto.caldara@unifr.ch.
authors.forename: Roberto
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Caldara
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Milano-Bicocca, Piazza dell'Ateneo Nuovo, 1, 20126 Milano, Italy; NeuroMi, Milan Center for Neuroscience, Milano, Italy.
authors.forename: Chiara
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Turati
mesh_terms: D001288:Attention; D003469:Culture; D004644:Emotions; D005149:Facial Expression; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D007564:Japan; D006113:United Kingdom; D014796:Visual Perception