Abstract
Franklin, Stevenson, Ambady, and Adams observe that there is little cross-cultural research in the ability to perceive information (emotion, cognitions, etc.) from the eyes of an individual. The authors argue that the eyes play a major role in social interaction and looking at within- and between-culture use of information from the eyes, what is referred to as mind reading, is important to understanding nonverbal communication.
The authors report on their research on this topic where they studied participants’ ability to mind read within and between cultures. While participants were accurate in their mind reading ability for both groups, they did show an advantage for their own culture. This advantage was marked by an increase in activity in the posterior superior temporal sulcus. This is consistent with other research on emotion recognition.
The authors also report on their research looking at how gender can play a role in mind reading accuracy. Additionally, they studied how multiple category differences, gender and culture, may affect mind reading ability. They found that women were more accurate in the mind reading task than men regardless of culture. fMRI revealed that women showed greater activation of the inferior frontal gyrus and cerebellum during the task while men showed greater activation of the superior temporal sulcus. These areas are known for reading facial cues, expressing empathy, and mirroring behavior.
Implications for how this work can affect nonverbal communication between cultures are discussed.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
The N100 and P200 components are generally considered to be associated with early attentional effects. Specifically, increased amplitude is associated with increased attention directed at a feature of a visual stimulus. The P300 component is generally considered to be associated with working memory operations, with increased amplitude indicative of a greater degree of encoding (see Ito & Urland, 2003).
References
Adams, Jr., R. B., Rule, N. O., Franklin, R. G., Wang, E., Stevenson, M. T., Yoshikawa, S., et al. (2010). Cross-cultural reading the mind in the eyes: An fMRI investigation. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 22, 97–108.
Adolphs, R., Gosselin, F., Buchanan, T. W., Tranel, D., Schyns, P., & Damasio, A. R. (2005). A mechanism for impaired fear recognition after amygdala damage. Nature, 433(7021), 68–72.
Allison, T., Puce, A., & McCarthy, G. (2000). Social perception from visual cues: role of the STS region. Trends in cognitive sciences, 4, 267–278.
Aronson, J., Lustina, M. J., Good, C., Keough, K., Steele, C. M., & Brown, J. (1999). When white men can’t do math: Necessary and sufficient factors in stereotype threat. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 35, 29–46.
Avis, J., & Harris, P. L. (1991). Belief-desire reasoning among Baka children: Evidence for a universal conception of mind. Child Development, 62(3), 460–467.
Baron-Cohen, S. (1995). Mindblindness: An essay on autism and theory of mind. Boston: MIT Press/Bradford Books.
Baron-Cohen, S., Ring, H. A., Wheelwright, S., Bullmore, E. T., Brammer, M. J., Simmons, A., et al. (1999). Social intelligence in the normal and autistic brain: An fMRI study. European Journal of Neuroscience, 11, 1891–1898.
Baron-Cohen, S., Riviere, A., Fukushima, M., French, D., Hadwin, J., Cross, P., et al. (1996). Reading the mind in the face: A cross-cultural and developmental study. Visual Cognition, 3, 39–59.
Baron-Cohen, S., Wheelwright, S., Hill, J., Raste, Y., & Plumb, I. (2001). The “reading the mind in the eyes” test revised version: A study with normal adults, and adults with asperger syndrome or high-functioning autism. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 42, 241–251.
Baron-Cohen, S., Wheelwright, S., & Jolliffe, T. (1997). Is there a “language of the eyes?” Evidence from normal adults, and adults with autism or asperger syndrome. Visual Cognition, 4, 311–331.
Bernstein, M. J., Young, S. G., & Hugenberg, K. (2007). The cross-category effect mere social categorization is sufficient to elicit an own-group bias in face recognition. Psychological Science, 18, 706–712.
Bruce, V., & Young, A. (1986). Understanding face recognition. British Journal of Psychology, 77, 305–327.
Brune, M., & Brune-Cohrs, U. (2006). Theory of mind: Evolution, ontogeny, brain mechanisms and psychopathology. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 30, 437–455.
Caldara, R., Rossion, B., Bovet, P., & Hauert, C. (2004). Event-related potentials and time course of the “other-race” face classification advantage. Neuroreport, 15(5), 905–910.
Caldara, R., Thut, G., Servoir, P., Michel, C. M., Bovet, P., & Renault, B. (2003). Face versus non-face object perception and the “other-race” effect: A spatio-temporal event-related potential study. Clinical Neurophysiology, 114, 515–528.
Chiao, J. Y., & Ambady, N. (2007). Cultural neuroscience: Parsing universality and diversity across levels of analysis. In D. Cohen & S. Kitayama (Eds.), Handbook of cultural psychology (pp. 237–254). New York, NY: Guilford Press.
Chiroro, P., & Valentine, T. (1995). An investigation of the contact hypothesis of the own-race bias in face recognition. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 48, 879–894.
Corenblum, B., & Meissner, C. A. (2006). Recognition of faces of ingroup and outgroup children and adults. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 93, 187–206.
Correll, J., Park, B., Wittenbrink, B., & Judd, C. M. (2002). The police officer’s dilemma: Using ethnicity to disambiguate potentially threatening individuals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83, 1314–1329.
Cross, J. F., Cross, J., & Daly, J. (1971). Sex, race, age, and beauty as factors in recognition of faces. Perception & Psychophysics, 10, 393–396.
Darwin, C. (1872/1965). The expression of the emotions in man and animals. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Dennett, D. C. (1978). Beliefs about beliefs. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 1, 568–570.
DePaulo, B. M., & Friedman, H. S. (1998). Nonverbal communication. In D. Gilbert, S. T. Fiske, & G. Lindzey (Eds.), Handbook of social psychology (4th ed., Vol. 2, pp. 3–40). New York: McGraw-Hill.
Dovidio, J. F., Gaertner, S. L., & Saguy, T. (2009). Commonality and the complexity of “we”: Social attitudes and social change. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 13, 3–20.
Eberhardt, J. L., Goff, P. A., Purdie, V. J., & Davies, P. G. (2004). Seeing black: Race, crime, and visual processing. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 87(6), 876–893.
Eckel, C. C., & Grossman, P. J. (2001). Chivalry and solidarity in ultimatum games. Economic Inquiry, 39(2), 171–188.
Ekman, P. (1972). Universals and cultural differences in facial expressions of emotion. In J. Cole (Ed.), Nebraska symposium on motivation; 1971 (Vol. 19, pp. 207–282). Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Elfenbein, H. A., & Ambady, N. (2002). On the universality and cultural specificity of emotion recognition: A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 128(2), 203–235.
Elfenbein, H. A., & Ambady, N. (2003a). Universals and cultural differences in recognizing emotions. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 12(5), 159–164.
Elfenbein, H. A., & Ambady, N. (2003b). When familiarity breeds accuracy: Cultural exposure and facial emotion recognition. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85, 276–290.
Flavell, J. H. (1999). Cognitive development: Children’s knowledge about the mind. Annual Review of Psychology, 50, 21–45.
Gaertner, S. L., & Dovidio, J. F. (2000). Reducing intergroup bias: The common ingroup identity model. Philadelphia: Psychology Press.
Gaertner, S. L., Dovidio, J. F., Banker, B. S., Houlette, M., Johnson, K. M., & McGlynn, E. A. (2000). Reducing intergroup conflict: From superordinate goals to decategorization, recategorization, and mutual differentiation. Group Dynamics: Theory, Research, and Practice, 4(1), 98–114.
Hall, J. (1978). Gender effects in decoding nonverbal cues. Psychological Bulletin, 85, 845–858.
Hancock, K. J., & Rhodes, G. (2008). Contact, configural coding and the other‐race effect in face recognition. British Journal of Psychology, 99(1), 45–56.
Hugenberg, K., & Sacco, D. F. (2008). Social categorization and stereotyping: How social categorization biases person perception and face memory. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 2, 1052–1072.
Irani, F., Platek, S. M., Panyavin, I. S., Calkins, M. E., Kohler, C., Siegel, S. J., et al. (2006). Self-face recognition and theory of mind in patients with schizophrenia and first-degree relatives. Schizophrenia Research, 88, 151–160.
Ito, T. A., Thompson, E., & Caioppo, J. T. (2004). Tracking the timecourse of social perception: The effects of racial cues on event-related brain potentials. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 30, 1267–1280.
Ito, T. A., & Urland, G. R. (2003). Race and gender on the brain: Electrocortical measures of attention to the race and gender of multiply categorizable individuals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85(4), 616–626.
Ito, T. A., & Urland, G. R. (2005). The influence of processing objectives on the perception of faces: An ERP study of race and gender perception. Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience, 5(1), 21–36.
Kawaguchi, D. (2007). A market test for sex discrimination: Evidence from Japanese firm-level panel data. International Journal of Industrial Organization, 25, 441–460.
Kelly, D. J., Quinn, P. C., Slater, A. M., Lee, K., Gibson, A., Smith, M., & Pascalis, O. (2005). Three-month-olds, but not newborns, prefer own-race faces. Developmental Science, 8, F31–F36.
Kobayashi, C., Glover, G. H., & Temple, E. (2006). Cultural and linguistic influence on neural bases of “theory of mind”: An fMRI study with Japanese bilinguals. Brain and Language, 98, 210–220.
Kobayashi, C., Glover, G. H., & Temple, E. (2007). Children’s and adults’ neural bases of verbal and nonverbal ‘theory of mind’. Neuropsychologia, 45, 1522–1532.
Levin, D. T. (1996). Classifying faces by race: The structure of face categories. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 22, 1364–1382.
Levin, D. T. (2000). Race as a visual feature: Using visual search and perceptual discrimination tasks to understand face categories and the cross-race recognition deficit. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 128(4), 559–574.
Leyens, J. P., Rodriguez-Perez, A., Rodriguez-Torres, R., Gaunt, R., Paladino, M. P., Vaes, J., et al. (2001). Psychological essentialism and the differential attribution of uniquely human emotions to ingroups and outgroups. European Journal of Social Psychology, 31, 395–411.
Lillard, A. S. (1998). Ethnopsychologies: Cultural variations in theories of mind. Psychological Bulletin, 123, 3–32.
Locke, V., Macrae, C. N., & Eaton, J. L. (2005). Is person categorization modulated by exemplar typicality? Social Cognition, 23(5), 417–428.
Maass, A., Cadinu, M., Guarnieri, G., & Grasselli, A. (2003). Sexual harassment under social identity threat: The computer harassment paradigm. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85, 853–870.
Maclin, O. H., & Malpass, R. S. (2001). Racial categorization of faces: The ambiguous race face effect. Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, 7(1), 98–118.
Macrae, C. N., & Martin, D. (2007). A boy primed sue: Feature-based processing and person construal. European Journal of Social Psychology, 37, 793–805.
Maddox, K. B. (2004). Perspectives on racial phenotypicality bias. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 8(4), 383–401.
Markus, H., Kitayama, S., & Heiman, R. (1996). Culture and “basic” psychological principles. In E. T. Higgins & A. W. Kruglanski (Eds.), Social psychology: Handbook of basic principles. New York: Guilford.
Mason, M. F., Cloutier, J., & Macrae, C. N. (2006). On construing others: Category and stereotype activation from facial cues. Social Cognition, 24, 540–562.
Mason, M. F., & Macrae, C. N. (2004). Categorizing and individuating others: The neural substrates of person perception. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 16, 1785–1795.
McKone, E., Brewer, J. L., MacPherson, S., Rhodes, G., & Hayward, W. G. (2007). Familiar other-race faces show normal holistic processing and are robust to perceptual stress. Perception, 36(2), 224.
Meissner, C. A., & Brigham, J. C. (2001). Thirty years of investigating the own-race bias in memory for faces. Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, 7, 3–35.
Michel, C., Rossion, B., Han, J., Chung, C., & Caldara, R. (2006). Holistic processing is finely tuned for faces of one’s own race. Psychological Science, 17, 608–615.
Mitchell, J. P., Banaji, M. R., & Macrae, C. N. (2005). The link between social cognition and self-referential thought in the medial prefrontal cortex. Journal of cognitive neuroscience, 17(8), 1306–1315.
Mitchell, J. P., Macrae, C. N., & Banaji, M. R. (2006). Dissociable medial prefrontal contributions to judgments of similar and dissimilar others. Neuron, 50, 655–663.
Morton, J., & Johnson, M. H. (1991). CONSPEC and CONLERN: a two-process theory of infant face recognition. Psychological Review, 98, 164–181.
Navarrete, C. D., McDonald, M. M., Molina, L. E., & Sidanius, J. (2010). Prejudice at the nexus of race and gender: An outgroup male target hypothesis. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 98(6), 933–945.
Nemoto, K. (2013). When culture resists progress: Masculine organizational culture and its impacts on the vertical segregation of women in Japanese companies. Work, Employment & Society, 27, 153–169.
Ostrom, T. M., & Sedikides, C. (1992). Out-group homogeneity effects in natural and minimal groups. Psychological Bulletin, 112, 536–552.
Paladino, P. M., Leyens, J. P., Rodriguez, R. T., Rodriguez, A. P., Gaunt, R., & Demoulin, S. (2002). Differential association of uniquely and nonuniquely human emotions to the ingroup and the outgroups. Group Processes and Intergroup Relations, 5, 105–117.
Pauker, K., Ambady, N., Weisbuch, M., Sommers, S. R., Adams, R. B., Jr., & Ivcevic, Z. (2009). Not so black and white: Memory for ambiguous group members. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 96, 795–810.
Perner, J., Ruffman, T., & Leekam, S. R. (1994). Theory of mind is contagious: You catch it from your sibs. Child Development, 65, 1228–1238.
Peterson, C. C. & Siegal M. (1997). Psychological, physical, and biological thinking in normal, autistic, and deaf children. In The Emergence of Core Domains of Thought: Children’s Reasoning About Physical, Psychological, and Biological Phenomena (New Directions for Child Development, No. 75) (pp. 55–70). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Rule, N. O., Ambady, N., Adams, R. B., Jr., & Macrae, C. N. (2008). Accuracy and awareness in the perception and categorization of male sexual orientation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 95, 1019–1028.
Sabbagh, M. A. (2004). Understanding orbitofrontal contributions to theory-of-mind reasoning: Implications for autism. Brain and Cognition, 55, 209–219.
Sangrigoli, S., & De Schonen, S. (2004a). Effect of visual experience on face processing: a developmental study of inversion and non-native effects. Developmental Science, 7, 74–87.
Sangrigoli, S., & De Schonen, S. (2004b). Recognition of own-race and other-race faces by three-month-old infants. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 45, 1219–1227.
Shamay-Tsoory, S. G., Aharon-Peretz, J., & Perry, D. (2009). Two systems for empathy: A double dissociation between emotional and cognitive empathy in inferior frontal gyrus versus ventromedial prefrontal lesions. Brain, 132, 617–627.
Shamay-Tsoory, S. G., Tomer, R., Berger, B. D., Goldsher, D., & Aharon-Peretz, J. (2005). Impaired “affective theory of mind” is associated with right ventromedial prefrontal damage. Cognitive and Behavioral Neurology, 18, 55–67.
Sherif, M. (1958). Superordinate goals in the reduction of intergroup conflict. American Journal of Sociology, 63, 349–356.
Skwerer, D. P., Verbalis, A., Schofield, C., Faja, S., & Tager-Flusberg, H. (2006). Social-perceptual abilities in adolescents and adults with Williams syndrome. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 23(2), 338–349.
Sporer, S. L. (2001). Recognizing faces of other ethnic groups: An integration of theories. Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, 7, 36–97.
Steele, C. M., & Aronson, J. (1995). Stereotype threat and the intellectual test performance of African Americans. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 69, 797–811.
Stevenson, M. T., Soto, J. A., & Adams, R. B., Jr. (2012). More than meets the eye: The role of self-identity in decoding complex emotional states. Emotion, 12, 882–886.
Tager-Flusberg, H. (2001). A reexamination of the theory of mind hypothesis of autism. In J. A. Burack, T. Charman, N. Yimiya, & P. R. Zelazo (Eds.), The development of autism: Perspectives from development and theory (pp. 173–193). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Tajfel, H. (1969). Cognitive aspects of prejudice. Journal of Social Issues, 25(4), 79–97.
Tajfel, H., & Turner, J. C. (1979). An integrative theory of intergroup conflict. In W. G. Austin & S. Worchel (Eds.), The social psychology of intergroup relations (pp. 33–48). Monterey, CA: Brooks/Cole.
Tanaka, J. W., Kiefer, M., & Bukach, C. M. (2004). A holistic account of the own-race effect in face recognition: Evidence from a cross-cultural study. Cognition, 93, B1–B9.
Toh, S. M., & Leonardelli, G. J. (2012). Cultural constraints on the emergence of women as leaders. Journal of World Business, 47(4), 604–611.
Turk, D. J., Handy, T. C., & Gazzaniga, M. S. (2005). Can perceptual expertise account for the own-race bias in face recognition? A split-brain study. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 22, 877–883.
Turner, J. C., Hogg, M. A., Oakes, P. J., Reicher, S. D., & Wetherell, M. S. (1987). Rediscovering the social group: A self-categorization theory. Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell.
Vaes, J., Paladino, M. P., & Leyens, J. (2006). Priming uniquely human emotion and the in-group(but not the out-group) activates humanity concepts. European Journal of Social Psychology, 36, 169–181.
Valentine, T., & Endo, M. (1992). Towards an exemplar model of face processing: The effects of race and distinctiveness. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 44(4), 671–703.
Van Overwalle, F., Baetens, K., Mariën, P., & Vandekerckhove, M. (2014). Social cognition and the cerebellum: A meta-analysis of over 350 fMRI studies. NeuroImage, 86, 554–572.
Wood, W., & Eagly, A. H. (2002). A cross-cultural analysis of the behavior of women and men: Implications for the origins of sex differences. Psychological Bulletin, 128(5), 699–729.
Zebrowitz, L. A. (2006). Finally, faces find favor. Social Cognition, 24, 657–701.
Acknowledgements
While writing this paper, we lost our dear friend and co-author Nalini Ambady. It is with our deepest sadness and greatest respect that we dedicate this paper to her memory.
We thank Sakiko Yoshikawa of Kyoto University for helping us generate the Asian Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test and to which we owe our data from Japanese participants (reported in Study 1).
This research was supported in part by the Social Science Research Institute, the Pennsylvania State University to RBA, Jr.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2015 Springer Science+Business Media New York
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Franklin, R.G., Stevenson, M.T., Ambady, N., Adams, R.B. (2015). Cross-Cultural Reading the Mind in the Eyes and Its Consequences for International Relations. In: Warnick, J., Landis, D. (eds) Neuroscience in Intercultural Contexts. International and Cultural Psychology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-2260-4_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-2260-4_5
Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY
Print ISBN: 978-1-4939-2259-8
Online ISBN: 978-1-4939-2260-4
eBook Packages: Behavioral ScienceBehavioral Science and Psychology (R0)