Culture Wires the Brain

Abstract

There is clear evidence that sustained experiences may affect both brain structure and function. Thus, it is quite reasonable to posit that sustained exposure to a set of cultural experiences and behavioral practices will affect neural structure and function. The burgeoning field of cultural psychology has often demonstrated the subtle differences in the way individuals process information—differences that appear to be a product of cultural experiences. We review evidence that the collectivistic and individualistic biases of East Asian and Western cultures, respectively, affect neural structure and function. We conclude that there is limited evidence that cultural experiences affect brain structure and considerably more evidence that neural function is affected by culture, particularly activations in ventral visual cortex—areas associated with perceptual processing.

Cultural influences on Facebook photographs

“…We reported that Americans tended to exhibit their entire face without other body parts and also were more likely to show greater smile intensity compared to their East Asian counterparts on Facebook profile photos. The finding is congruent with the notion of context-inclusive styles for East Asian and object-focused styles for Westerners (Kitayama & Uskul, 2011; Masuda & Nisbett, 2001; Nisbett & Masuda, 2003; Park & Huang, 2010), and provides evidence supporting the notion that culture-preferred styles are implicitly embedded in cultural products (Morling & Lamoreaux, 2008; Masuda et al, 2008a). We believe this may be the first demonstration that culture influences self-presentation on Facebook, the most popular worldwide online social network site.…”

“…Westerners, due to the individualistic, independent, and self-based focus of their culture, have a tendency to process focal objects and organize information via rules and categories in an analytic way. In contrast, East Asians, based on their collectivist and interdependent representation, tend to view themselves as part of a larger whole, resulting in a holistic information-processing bias where object and contextual information are jointly encoded (Kitayama & Uskul, 2011; Masuda & Nisbett, 2001; Nisbett & Masuda, 2003; Park & Huang, 2010). …”

Why Should We All Be Cultural Psychologists? Lessons From the Study of Social Cognition

“…To the present day, cultural psychology has developed into a sophisticated field of research with well established theories and methodologies (for a review, see Kitayama & Cohen D., 2007). Some of the particularly notable developments include cultural neuroscience (Chiao, Cheon, Pornpattananangkul, Mrazek, & Blizinsky, 2013; Park & Huang, 2010), investigations of the causes of cultural change (Greenfield, 2013; Trzesniewski & Donnellan, 2010; Twenge, Campbell, & Freeman, 2012; also see Freeman, 2002, and Putnam, 2000), the study of Gene × Culture interaction (Kim & Sasaki, 2012; Kitayama, King, Yoon, Tompson, Huff, & Liberzon, 2014; Luo, Ma, Liu, Li, Wang, Shi, & … Han, 2015), the use of social network analysis to study cultural experience and behavior (Mao & Shen, 2015; Qiu, Lin, & Leung, 2013), and the integration of ecological perspectives to understand origins of cultural variability (Kitayama et al, 2010; Talhelm, Zhang, Oishi, Shimin, Duan, Lan, & Kitayama, 2014). These theoretical and methodological advances have allowed investigators not only to identify but, more importantly, explain and predict group differences.…”

“…I do not intend to spend much space to argue against this erroneous assumption, as numerous theories and abundant studies have shown that human behavior unfolds as a dynamic transaction between an active individual and his changing environment (e.g., Coll & Marks, 2009; Hermans, 2001; Hong et al, 2000; Kitayama & Cohen D., 2007; Shweder et al, 1998; Sternberg, 2014). Many “basic” psychological processes and constructs for which culture is typically assumed to be irrelevant, such as neuronal functioning (Chiao et al, 2013; Park & Huang, 2010), sensation (Levitan, Ren, Woods, Boesveldt, Chan, McKenzie et al, 2014; Yeshurun & Sobel, 2010), visual illusions (Kitayama, Duffy, Kawamura, & Larsen, 2003; McCauley & Henrich, 2006), face processing (Kelly, Liu, Rodger, Miellet, Ge, & Caldara, 2011), and color perception (Roberson, Davidoff, Davies, & Shapiro, 2005; Taylor, Clifford, & Franklin, 2013), have been shown to be sensitive to cultural influences. Even simple taste preferences are subject to local community practices rather than being part of human genetic composition as commonly assumed.…”

Emotion perception across cultures: the role of cognitive mechanisms

“…While this question has received relatively little attention to date (see however, Nisbett and Masuda, 2003; Park and Huang, 2010), we review recent findings that have shed light on cultural influences on cognitive mechanisms involved in extracting and categorizing emotional expressions. Specifically, we integrate two recent developments in cross-cultural psychology that provide particular insights into the modulatory role of culture on interpretations of emotional expressions and underlying cognitive mechanisms, namely (a) investigations of cross-cultural differences in emotion intensity perception that underline the impact of display rules on emotion prototypes , and (b) investigations of cross-cultural differences in feature extraction during decoding of facial expressions of emotions that underline the influence of culture on cognitive styles.…”