title: Cultural immersion alters emotion perception: Neurophysiological evidence from Chinese immigrants to Canada.
abstract: To explore how cultural immersion modulates emotion processing, this study examined how Chinese immigrants to Canada process multisensory emotional expressions, which were compared to existing data from two groups, Chinese and North Americans. Stroop and Oddball paradigms were employed to examine different stages of emotion processing. The Stroop task presented face-voice pairs expressing congruent/incongruent emotions and participants actively judged the emotion of one modality while ignoring the other. A significant effect of cultural immersion was observed in the immigrants' behavioral performance, which showed greater interference from to-be-ignored faces, comparable with what was observed in North Americans. However, this effect was absent in their N400 data, which retained the same pattern as the Chinese. In the Oddball task, where immigrants passively viewed facial expressions with/without simultaneous vocal emotions, they exhibited a larger visual MMN for faces accompanied by voices, again mirroring patterns observed in Chinese. Correlation analyses indicated that the immigrants' living duration in Canada was associated with neural patterns (N400 and visual mismatch negativity) more closely resembling North Americans. Our data suggest that in multisensory emotion processing, adopting to a new culture first leads to behavioral accommodation followed by alterations in brain activities, providing new evidence on human's neurocognitive plasticity in communication.
authors: a School of Communication Sciences and Disorders , McGill University , Montréal , Canada.|b Centre for Research on Brain, Language, and Music (CRBLM) , McGill University , Montréal , Canada.
authors: Pan
authors: P
authors: Liu
authors: b Centre for Research on Brain, Language, and Music (CRBLM) , McGill University , Montréal , Canada.|c International Laboratory for Brain, Music and Sound Research (BRAMS) , McGill University , Montréal , Canada.
authors: Simon
authors: S
authors: Rigoulot
authors: a School of Communication Sciences and Disorders , McGill University , Montréal , Canada.|b Centre for Research on Brain, Language, and Music (CRBLM) , McGill University , Montréal , Canada.|c International Laboratory for Brain, Music and Sound Research (BRAMS) , McGill University , Montréal , Canada.
authors: Marc D
authors: 0000-0002-9947-1552
authors: MD
authors: Pell
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001921:Brain / Q000502:physiology*; D002170:Canada; D002681:China / Q000208:ethnology; D003469:Culture; D054242:Emigrants and Immigrants / Q000523:psychology*; D004644:Emotions / Q000502:physiology*; D005071:Evoked Potentials; D000066499:Facial Recognition / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011930:Reaction Time; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D057190:Stroop Test; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Cultural adaptation; emotion; emotional prosody; event-related brain potential (ERP); facial expression