Abstract
Cultural differences in desirable emotions powerfully impact brain activation and responses to specific stimuli. However, how people from different cultures process emotions in social contexts similarly and differently have not been adequately studied. Therefore, the present study examined cross-cultural differences in emotional processing of positive emotions in social contexts by using event-related potentials (ERPs) and behavior measurements. A total of 29 Chinese and 23 white Caucasians participants were recruited. A 2 (culture) X 2 (stimuli type) ANOVA was employed for both the neuro and behavioral data. The results showed P2 amplitudes were larger for Chinese than for Caucasians in the positive emotion in the social context condition. There were no significant differences in P2 amplitudes when processing positive emotion and neutral stimuli. For Chinese, the amplitudes of LPP 600–1000 of Chinese positive emotion in the social context stimuli were larger than positive emotion stimuli. For Caucasians, there was no significant difference among different stimuli. The higher P2 and LPP 600–1000 amplitudes suggested the salience and significance of positive emotions in social contexts for Chinese. Findings indicated that neural activation occurring during the processing of different positive emotions is moderated by participants’ own cultural background. Further implications were discussed.
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Notes
While the framework of the experiment is similar, the photos used are not the same as Deng et al., 2019. Since different photos were chosens, it is not the exact same experiment, and is intended to loosely replicate the results of Chinese participants.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation for Young Scientists of China (31700941); Humanity and Social Science Youth foundation of Ministry of Education of China (16YJC190003); PhD Start-up Fund of Natural Science Foundation of Guangdong Province (2017A030310299) to X.D.
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The research protocol was reviewed and approved by the Institutional Review Board of Shenzhen University. All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were conducted in accordance with the ethical standards of the Institutional Review Board of Shenzhen University and with the 1964 Declaration of Helsinki and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.
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Deng, X., An, S. & You, Y. Cross-cultural differences in the processing of social and non-social positive emotions: An ERP study. Curr Psychol 42, 13443–13454 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-021-02604-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-021-02604-8