Cultural differences in sensitivity to social context: Detecting affective incongruity using the N400

Abstract

East Asians and Asian-Americans tend to allocate relatively greater attention to background context compared to European Americans across a variety of cognitive and neural measures. We sought to extend these findings of cultural differences to affective stimuli using the N400, which has been shown to be sensitive to deep processing of affective information. The degree to which Asian-Americans and European Americans responded to semantic incongruity between emotionally expressive faces (i.e., smiling or frowning) and background affective scenes was measured. As predicted, Asian-Americans showed a greater N400 to incongruent trials than to congruent trials. In contrast, European Americans showed no difference in amplitude across the two conditions. Furthermore, greater affective N400 incongruity was associated with higher interdependent self-construals. These data suggest that Asian-Americans and those with interdependent self-construals process the relationship between perceived facial emotion and affective background context to a greater degree than European Americans and those with independent self-construals. Implications for neural and cognitive differences in everyday social interactions, and cultural differences in analytic and holistic thinking are discussed.

Keywords:

• Culture
• N400
• Interdependent self-construal
• Context
• Emotion

Acknowledgments

We thank Alyssa Sanchez, Gabriela Alarcon, and Angud Mehdi for help with data collection and Tracy Zhao, Colleen Moore, and Zachary Schudson for help with manuscript preparation.

Notes

¹Nisbett and colleagues (Nisbett & Miyamoto, 2005; Nisbett et al., 2001) refer to “Western” and “East Asian” cognitive styles, where “Western” refers to Western Europeans and European North Americans and “East Asian” refers to those living in East Asia. In previous work, East Asian Americans have shown more holistic cognitive styles in comparison with European Americans (Goto et al., 2010; Lewis et al., 2008). We use the terms “East Asian American” and “European American” in recognition of people of East Asian descent and European descent, respectively, living in North America.

² Composite scores representing unidimensionality (collectivism–individualism) were also calculated and analyzed (see Chiao et al., 2009), resulting in a consistent, but weaker correlation with the N400; r = 0.22; p = .14.