How culture shapes our brain: Neural correlates of cultural differences in social cognition
Final Report Abstract
Grounded in the framework of cultural neuroscience, the major objective for the project was to clarify cultural influences on social-cognitive processing. Previous studies have indicated an intracultural advantage, i.e. preferred processing of people from the own culture in individualistic cultures. However, for collectivistic cultures, the results have been inconsistent. Therefore, our project focused on neural bases of social cognition and their sensitivity to cultural differences. We assessed two independent samples of participants with the two different cultural backgrounds: individualistic (Germany) and collectivistic (China) to allow examining reliability of our findings. Neural correlates of social cognition were measured with three social cognition tasks: imitation, empathy for basic emotions, and empathy for social emotions. In addition, questionnaires served to identify traits related to social and emotional processing. The social-cognitive tasks resulted in reliable activation in regions associated with the recognition of others’ emotions and sharing their feelings, e.g. superior temporal sulcus and temporoparietal junction. Chinese and Germans differed in empathy ratings and in several self-reports of social and emotional processing, e.g. social and interactional anxiety. However, while neural activation in the tasks differed between cultures, only few of these activation differences suggested an intracultural advantage in the groups, and only a limited number could be replicated across the independent samples. We conclude that differences in social cognition exist between cultures, but neither in individualistic, nor in collectivistic cultures, a strong intragroup advantage in social cognition occurs in the applied standardized fMRI-tasks.
Publications
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The effect of ethnicity and team membership on face processing: a cultural neuroscience perspective. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 14(9), 1017-1025.
Yan, Zhimin; Schmidt, Stephanie N L; Saur, Sebastian; Kirsch, Peter & Mier, Daniela
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The Neural Correlates of Sharing with Others’ Embarrassment: A Cultural Neuroscience Perspective, Psychologie und Gehirn (PuG), Dresden
Zhimin Yan, Stephanie N. L. Schmidt, Christian A. Sojer, Daniela Mier & Peter Kirsch
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Do we feel us? A cross-cultural fMRI study on empathy between Germans and Chinese, Psychologie und Gehirn (PuG), Tübingen (online)
Christian A. Sojer, Zhimin Yan, Stephanie N. L. Schmidt, Peter Kirsch & Daniela Mier
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Imitation - a basic mechanism culturally influenced? An fMRI investigation of Chinese and German participants, Psychologie und Gehirn (PuG), Freiburg
Christian A. Sojer, Stephanie N. L. Schmidt, Zhimin Yan, Peter Kirsch & Daniela Mier
