The present study employs transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), a non-invasive brain stimulation technique, to explore the possible role of the right temporoparietal junction (rTPJ) in regulating in-group bias in facial emotional mimicry. Participants received either anodal or cathodal stimulation, or they were assigned to a sham condition. After that, they passively viewed a series of video clips depicting different emotions (happiness and anger) that were performed either by ethnic in-group or out-group models. The emotion-specific muscle activities, zygomatic major (ZM) and corrugator supercilii (CS) were recorded simultaneously as the index of facial emotional mimicry. The results first confirm the in-group bias in facial emotional mimicry in the sham condition, as shown in prior studies, though it only occurs in happy mimicry. Moreover, the in-group bias in facial emotional mimicry is modulated by the cortical excitability over the rTPJ, which may be attributed to the accompanied change of overlap of the mental representations of in-group and out-group. This study provides a close look at the neural underpinning of the modulation of facial emotional mimicry by group membership and highlights the role of rTPJ in on-line control of co-activated self and other representations in social cognition.

The hierarchical view of working memory suggested that object ensemble could also be stored into working memory by treating ensemble properties as single “unit.” However, it remains unclear whether ensemble representation in working memory is vulnerable to attention demanding. The present study designed a dual-task paradigm constituting of a memory retaining task and an attention-demanding arrow flanker task. Participants were firstly presented an array (4 or 9) of facial images with neutral expressions and then shown a left- or right-orientated arrow surrounded by four congruent or incongruent oriented arrows or short lines. Participants judged the orientation of the target arrow and then indicated whether a probe facial image was present or absent in the preceding facial array. The probe face consisted of four conditions: (1) a morphed average face of prior face set, (2) a morphed average face of another face set, (3) an exemplar face of prior set, and (4) an exemplar face of another face set. Results confirmed that participants implicitly coded the average facial image of preceding set and retained in working memory. More importantly, the memory representation of ensemble property (e.g., average facial identity) was independent of flanker type. In sum, this study provided further evidence of the hierarchical view of working memory and suggested that attention was not a pre-requisite for the retaining of ensemble properties in working memory.

Research has shown that observers often spontaneously extract a mean representation from multiple faces/objects in a scene even when this is not required by the task. This phenomenon, now known as ensemble coding, has so far mainly been based on data from Western populations. This study compared East Asian and Western participants in an implicit ensemble-coding task, where the explicit task was to judge whether a test face was present in a briefly exposed set of faces. Although both groups showed a tendency to mistake an average of the presented faces as target, thus confirming the universality of ensemble coding, East Asian participants displayed a higher averaging tendency relative to the Westerners. To further examine how a cultural default can be adapted to global or local processing demand, our second experiment tested the effects of priming global or local processing orientation on ensemble coding via a Navon task procedure. Results revealed a reduced tendency for ensemble coding following the priming of local processing orientation. Together, these results suggest that culture can influence the proneness to ensemble coding, and the default cultural mode is malleable to a temporary processing demand.

To investigate the universality and cultural specificity of emotion processing in children from three different ethnic groups (Han, Jingpo, and Dai), we administered three questionnaires, including the emotional contagion scale, emotion regulation scale, and the Chinese mood adjective check list, to 1,362 ethnic Han, Dai, and Jingpo participants ( M age = 13.78 years). Structural equation modeling was used to examine the universality and cultural specificity in the relations among emotional contagion, emotion regulation, and mood state. The results revealed that emotion regulation mediated the relation between emotional contagion and mood state: positive emotional contagion increased positive mood state and decreased negative mood state by the mediated role of reappraisal, negative emotional contagion decreased positive contagion and increased negative mood state by the inconsistent mediated role of reappraisal; negative contagion increased negative mood state by the mediated role of suppression. We found both universality and cultural specificity in the relations among emotional contagion, emotion regulation, and mood state. Regarding cultural specificity, among Dai and Jingpo participants, negative contagion positively predicted reappraisal, while for Han participants, it did not; Jingpo participants demonstrated a weaker negative relation between reappraisal and negative mood state, and a stronger positive relation between negative contagion and suppression; and Dai participants were the only ethnic group that showed a negative connection between negative contagion and positive mood state. Regarding emotion universality, the three ethnic groups all showed positive relations between negative contagion and negative mood, and between suppression and negative mood; additionally, positive contagion positively predicted positive mood state, mediated by reappraisal. Thus, some emotion processes are universal and others more specific. In this paper, we discuss universal emotion processes and ethnic cultural differences in these emotion processes.

Field dependence/independence (FDI), refers to one's preferred style in perceiving one's surroundings, either analytically and individually, or globally and collectively, and has been a popular topic in recent cross- and within-culture research. Previous researchers have suggested that members of individualist and collectivist cultures differ in the degree to which they perceive objects either analytically and context-independently or holistically and context-dependently. Cross-culture variation in FDI has been thoroughly studied, whereas within-culture investigations have seldom been undertaken. We explored the within-culture variation of FDI with 593 Chinese colleague students, via administering the Embedded Figures Test. As we predicted, results showed that participants from the more individualist north China area exhibited stronger degrees of field independence than did their more collectivist southern counterparts. We have supported and extended the notion that culture affects individual experiences on a basic perceptual level with new within-culture data.