EAPSI: The Influence of Cultural Differences in Emotion Conceptual Knowledge on Emotion Perception

Brooks Jeffrey A, Brooklyn NY

Investigators

Abstract

Upon seeing another person's face, we are able to effortlessly understand what emotions they might be feeling, and researchers in psychology and neuroscience have done a great deal of work to understand how we are able to understand this information so quickly. Recent theoretical insights hold that conceptual knowledge about emotion (e.g. how we think about and conceptualize emotions like anger) helps us rapidly understand the meaning of emotional facial expressions. This offers a possible explanation for cultural differences that have been observed between Western and East Asian (e.g. Japanese) people perceive emotions from facial expressions. This study will use neuroimaging (functional MRI) to measure the way that emotions such as "anger" and "fear" are represented in the brains of Japanese and American participants when they view emotional facial expressions. By also measuring each participant's concepts about emotion, we will be able to show the influence of emotion concepts on the way the brain processes emotion. We hypothesize that cultural differences in conceptual knowledge will be the strongest influence on cultural differences in emotion perception. This research will help scientists understand where cultural differences in emotion come from, and will also inform important debates about how emotions are processed in the brain. Aside from its theoretical contributions, this research will inform clinical research on conditions such as autism that reduce patients' ability to perceive emotions accurately. This study will be a collaborative effort between the fellow and Dr. Norihiro Sadato of the National Institute for Physiological Sciences in Okazaki, Aichi Prefecture, Japan. Dr. Sadato is an expert in the field of human neuroimaging with an enthusiasm for participating in cross-cultural psychological and neuroscientific research with scientists from the U.S. Recent accounts of emotion perception and person construal suggest that conceptual knowledge about emotion categories is able to provide a top-down influence on emotion perception before emotion categorizations have fully stabilized. This theoretical approach offers a new route for understanding cultural differences between Western and East Asian subjects in emotion perception. Thus far, many researchers have interpreted these differences as reflecting different cultural norms between American and Japanese participants in how emotions are interpreted and reported. However, we predict that the strongest predictor of cultural differences in emotion perception will be differences in emotion concept knowledge between cultures. To test this, we will perform an fMRI task that measures patterns of neural activity in response to emotional facial expressions, as well as a behavioral task in which we index the conceptual structure of emotion categories and similarity in how they are perceived. Using representational similarity analysis (RSA) we will index the correspondence between conceptual similarity, perceptual similarity, and neural pattern similarity. These results will inform ongoing debates in social and affective neuroscience on the way that emotion is processed and represented in the brain, and the way that cultural differences observed in behavior can manifest at the level of neural representation. This award, under the East Asia and Pacific Summer Institutes program, supports summer research by a U.S. graduate student and is jointly funded by NSF and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.