Culture and Aesthetic Preference: Comparing the Attention to Context of East Asians and Americans

Abstract

Prior research indicates that East Asians are more sensitive to contextual information than Westerners. This article explored aesthetics to examine whether cultural variations were observable in art and photography. Study 1 analyzed traditional artistic styles using archival data in representative museums. Study 2 investigated how contemporary East Asians and Westerners draw landscape pictures and take portrait photographs. Study 3 further investigated aesthetic preferences for portrait photographs. The results suggest that (a) traditional East Asian art has predominantly context-inclusive styles, whereas Western art has predominantly object-focused styles, and (b) contemporary members of East Asian and Western cultures maintain these culturally shaped aesthetic orientations. The findings can be explained by the relation among attention, cultural resources, and aesthetic preference.

The cultural construction of emotions

“…Several studies have found emotions in the United Sates to be understood as arising from the individual, but in Japan as arising from the relationships between individuals [38,39]. These differences in conceptualization are important to both experience and perception.…”

Cultural Congruence and Rating Scale Biases in Homepages

“…Masuda and Nisbett [25], for example, showed that Japanese participants included information about the context of objects and about relationships among the objects 65% more often than Americans. Similarly, Masuda et al [26] showed American and Japanese students cartoons depicting a happy, sad, angry, or neutral person surrounded by others expressing the same or a different emotion. They found that Japanese, but not Americans, were influenced by the surrounding people's emotions when judging the focal person's emotion.…”

Cultural differences in opportunity cost consideration

“…Previous research in culture and cognition has demonstrated that East Asians are generally more sensitive and attentive to context than are North Americans (Ji et al, 2000;Masuda and Nisbett, 2001;Nisbett et al, 2001;Nisbett and Norenzayan, 2002;Nisbett, 2003;Masuda et al, 2008). For example, Ji et al (2000) found that, compared to European Americans, East Asians were more likely to detect covariation between events and were more field dependent when making perceptual judgments.…”