Differential dorsal and ventral medial prefrontal representations of the implicit self modulated by individualism and collectivism: An fMRI study

Abstract

Individualism and collectivism, or self-construal style, refer to cultural values that influence how people think about themselves and their relation to the social and physical environment. Recent neuroimaging evidence suggests that cultural values of individualism and collectivism dynamically modulate neural response within cortical midline structures, such as the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) and posterior cingulate cortex (PCC), during explicit self-evaluation. However, it remains unknown whether cultural priming modulates neural response during self-evaluation due to explicit task demands. Here we investigated how cultural priming of self-construal style affects neural activity within cortical midline structures during implicit self-evaluation in bicultural individuals. Results indicate that ventral MPFC showed relatively less deactivation during implicit evaluation of both self- and father-relevant information as compared to control condition (e.g., information of an unfamiliar person), irrespective of cultural priming. By contrast, dorsal MPFC showed relatively less deactivation during implicit evaluation of father-relevant information, but not self-relevant information, as compared to control condition, only when they were primed with individualism. Furthermore, dorsal MPFC showed relatively less deactivation during implicit evaluation of father-relevant information as compared to self-relevant condition only when they were primed with individualism. Hence, our results indicate that cultural priming modulates neural response within dorsal, but not ventral, portions of MPFC in a stimulus-driven rather than task-driven manner. More broadly, these findings suggest that cultural values dynamically shape neural representations during the evaluation, rather than the detection, of self-relevant information.

Keywords:

• fMRI
• Self-construal style
• Cultural priming
• Medial prefrontal cortex
• Implicit self
• Culture
• Self
• Cultural neuroscience

The authors thank Donna J. Bridge and Trixie Lipke for help with data collection. This study was supported by NSF BCS-0720312 and NSF BCS-0722326 grants to JYC.

Notes

¹ We did not include a physiological baseline condition (e.g., experimental trials where participants passively viewed a fixation cross). Thus, we are not able to determine whether or not the relative increment of activity observed in ventral and dorsal medial prefrontal regions occurred as the result of an increase above or a lesser decrease in neural activity relative to a physiological baseline condition. Hence, we will discuss potential functioning as to differential neural modulations observed in the current study based on the results from the subtraction analyses (e.g., the relative increment of activity in self condition as compared to control condition) in the following several sections.