Abstract
Previous research suggests that individuals from individualistic and collectivistic cultures, due to different construal of the self and social groups, might have different emotional experiences and attenuate their emotional experiences differently across situations. The current research investigates the influence of these cultural orientations specifically on the neural response to different valences of emotions and across different social situations. Event-related brain potentials were recorded when individualism-representative Dutch in the Netherlands and collectivism-representative Chinese participants in China (N = 40) viewed affective pictures (the International Affective Picture System) while being alone, being accompanied by a culturally similar person, and being accompanied by a culturally dissimilar person. The late positive potential (LPP) in Dutch participants showed a differentiation between valences (negative vs. positive) of emotions while this was not the case for Chinese participants. This suggests a wider range of emotional experience in the Dutch group and possibly stronger emotional attenuation in the Chinese group. Furthermore, the Chinese group showed a hemispheric differentiation in LPP amplitude between culturally similar and dissimilar situations whereas the Dutch did not. However, this effect was small and laterality index analysis indicated that there was no corresponding statistically significant difference in hemispheric dominance. These findings indicate that culture has an effect on neural emotional responding indexed by LPP. Evidence for a role of culture in the impact of social situation on emotional responding indexed by LPP was weak.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Dian Yu and Yi Liu for their help in data collection and our participants in China and the Netherlands for their participation in the experiment. We thank everyone at the Amsterdam Interdisciplinary Centre for Emotion for a helpful discussion of the results. Finally, thanks to serendipity, the first and second author met through the project and that was the start of our beautiful friendship!
Funding
This work was supported by the European Commission’s Seventh Framework Marie Curie Actions for Fellow Kate Woodcock (Grant Number PIOF-GA-2009-252877-20110221) and by the VICI Grant of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO, http://www.nwo.nl/) for Lydia Krabbendam (Grant Number 453-11-005).
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Appendix
Appendix
Background questionnaire
In China, the Chinese translation was used. In the Netherlands, a Dutch translation was used.
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1.
Participant ID:
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2.
What is your gender (male/female)?
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3.
What is the date today? (yyyymmdd)
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4.
What is your date of birth? (yyyymmdd)
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5.
What is your nationality?
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6.
What is your native (first) language?
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7.
Are you right handed or left handed?
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8.
How long have you spent in China (including Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan) [the Netherlands]? (years, months)
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9.
How long have you spent in other countries in East Asia (including Japan, Korea and Mongolia) [Western Europe]? (years, months)
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10.
How long have you spent in Europe, the United States or Canada? (years, months)
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11.
Have you lived anywhere else in the world? if “yes” please go to question 12, if “no” please go to question 13
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12.
Which other countries (not in East Asia, Europe, the United States or Canada) have you lived in and for how long (years, months)?
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13.
Where do you consider to be your “home town” (the place where you are from)? (Town, City, Country)
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14.
Are you a fluent English speaker [of East Asian languages]? (yes, no) if “yes” go to question 15, if “no” go to question 16
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15.
How many years have you been a fluent speaker of English [of East Asian languages]?
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16.
Are you a fluent Chinese speaker (including any regional Chinese language/dialect) [Dutch]? if “yes” go to question 17, if “no” go to END
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17.
Which Chinese language(s) do you speak fluently?
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18.
How long have you been a fluent speaker of Chinese [Dutch]?
In the Dutch version, the 17 question was skipped.
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Vu, T., van der Meulen, A., Heslenfeld, D. et al. Neural responses to affective stimuli across culturally similar and dissimilar situations. Cult. Brain 8, 1–26 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40167-019-00082-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40167-019-00082-1