Cultural immersion alters emotion perception: Neurophysiological evidence from Chinese immigrants to Canada

ABSTRACT

To explore how cultural immersion modulates emotion processing, this study examined how Chinese immigrants to Canada process multisensory emotional expressions, which were compared to existing data from two groups, Chinese and North Americans. Stroop and Oddball paradigms were employed to examine different stages of emotion processing. The Stroop task presented face–voice pairs expressing congruent/incongruent emotions and participants actively judged the emotion of one modality while ignoring the other. A significant effect of cultural immersion was observed in the immigrants’ behavioral performance, which showed greater interference from to-be-ignored faces, comparable with what was observed in North Americans. However, this effect was absent in their N400 data, which retained the same pattern as the Chinese. In the Oddball task, where immigrants passively viewed facial expressions with/without simultaneous vocal emotions, they exhibited a larger visual MMN for faces accompanied by voices, again mirroring patterns observed in Chinese. Correlation analyses indicated that the immigrants’ living duration in Canada was associated with neural patterns (N400 and visual mismatch negativity) more closely resembling North Americans. Our data suggest that in multisensory emotion processing, adopting to a new culture first leads to behavioral accommodation followed by alterations in brain activities, providing new evidence on human’s neurocognitive plasticity in communication.

KEYWORDS:

• Cultural adaptation
• emotion
• event-related brain potential (ERP)
• facial expression
• emotional prosody

Acknowledgement

This work was supported by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada under an Insight Grant (435-2013-1027) to M. Pell.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. In order to examine whether the age difference between groups (immigrants were younger than the other two groups, F(2, 54) = 3.525, p < .05) covaried with any of the response measures, regression analyses were run with age as the predictor and response measures of the two tasks as dependent variables (difference accuracy, difference RT, amplitude of difference N400, amplitude of vMMN), in each of the three groups and across three groups, respectively. Results showed that age did not predict any response measure in any group(s) (ps > .34).

2. Here, the r-value represents a moderate effect size (toward the higher end) for Pearson’s r (Cohen, 1988; Hemphill, 2003).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada under an Insight Grant awarded to M. D. Pell [Grant Number 435-2013-1027].