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Cultural differences in sensitivity to social context:

Detecting affective incongruity using the N400

Sharon G. Goto a , Alicia Yee , Kelly Lowenberg

a & Richard S. Lewis

a

a Department of Psychology, Pomona College, Claremont, CA, USA

Version of record first published: 01 Nov 2012.

To cite this article: Sharon G. Goto , Alicia Yee , Kelly Lowenberg & Richard S. Lewis (2013): Cultural differences in

sensitivity to social context: Detecting affective incongruity using the N400, Social Neuroscience, 8:1, 63-74

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17470919.2012.739202

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SOCIAL NEUROSCIENCE, 2013Vol. 8, No. 1, 63–74, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17470919.2012.739202

Cultural differences in sensitivity to social context:Detecting affective incongruity using the N400

Sharon G. Goto, Alicia Yee*, Kelly Lowenberg, and Richard S. Lewis

Department of Psychology, Pomona College, Claremont, CA, USA

East Asians and Asian-Americans tend to allocate relatively greater attention to background context compared toEuropean Americans across a variety of cognitive and neural measures. We sought to extend these findings ofcultural differences to affective stimuli using the N400, which has been shown to be sensitive to deep processing ofaffective information. The degree to which Asian-Americans and European Americans responded to semanticincongruity between emotionally expressive faces (i.e., smiling or frowning) and background affective sceneswas measured. As predicted, Asian-Americans showed a greater N400 to incongruent trials than to congruenttrials. In contrast, European Americans showed no difference in amplitude across the two conditions. Furthermore,greater affective N400 incongruity was associated with higher interdependent self-construals. These data suggestthat Asian-Americans and those with interdependent self-construals process the relationship between perceivedfacial emotion and affective background context to a greater degree than European Americans and those withindependent self-construals. Implications for neural and cognitive differences in everyday social interactions, andcultural differences in analytic and holistic thinking are discussed.

Keywords: Culture; N400; Interdependent self-construal; Context; Emotion.

The recent literature on cultural differences incognition has generally found that East Asians andAsian-Americans attend to the background contextmore than European Americans, who attend to theforeground and focal objects. This has been repli-cated across several paradigms such as memory forunderwater scenes (Masuda & Nisbett, 2001), changeblindness (Masuda & Nisbett, 2006), visual changedetection (Boduroglu, Shah, & Nisbett, 2009), eyemovement patterns (Chua, Boland, & Nisbett, 2005),the Framed Line Test (Kitayama, Duffy, Kawamura, &Larsen, 2003), and the Rod and Frame Test (Ji,Peng, & Nisbett, 2000). These empirical findings havebeen interpreted in terms of the analytic–holistic dis-tinction postulated by Nisbett and colleagues. EastAsian cognitive styles are characterized as more

Correspondence should be addressed to: Sharon G. Goto, Department of Psychology, Pomona College, 647 N. College Way, Claremont,CA 91711, USA. E-mail: sgoto@pomona.edu

!Present address: Department of Psychology, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR, USAWe thank Alyssa Sanchez, Gabriela Alarcon, and Angud Mehdi for help with data collection and Tracy Zhao, Colleen Moore, and Zachary

Schudson for help with manuscript preparation.

holistic and European American cognitive styles arecharacterized as more analytic (Nisbett & Miyamoto,2005; Nisbett, Peng, Choi, & Norenzayan, 2001).1

One characteristic of a holistic cognitive style is awide focus of attention and the processing of the

1Nisbett and colleagues (Nisbett & Miyamoto, 2005; Nisbettet al., 2001) refer to “Western” and “East Asian” cognitive styles,where “Western” refers to Western Europeans and European NorthAmericans and “East Asian” refers to those living in East Asia.In previous work, East Asian Americans have shown more holis-tic cognitive styles in comparison with European Americans (Gotoet al., 2010; Lewis et al., 2008). We use the terms “East AsianAmerican” and “European American” in recognition of people ofEast Asian descent and European descent, respectively, living inNorth America.

© 2013 Taylor & Francis

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relationship among objects in the broad attentionalfield. In contrast, an analytic cognitive style is char-acterized by a narrower focus of attention, typicallyprocessing focal, foreground objects.

Neuroscientific methods have been used to fur-ther investigate these cultural differences in visualperception of focal and background objects. Thesestudies have discovered cultural differences in neuralactivity in object-processing regions of the occip-ital lobe when viewing focal objects (Goh et al.,2007; Gutchess, Welsh, Boduroglu, & Park, 2006)and in frontal and parietal attentional areas when per-forming context-dependent judgments of line length(Hedden, Ketay, Aron, Markus, & Gabrieli, 2008).Furthermore, the novelty P3 event-related potential(ERP) has been shown to be sensitive to cultural dif-ferences in attention to visually presented targets andcontextually novel items (Lewis, Goto, & Kong, 2008).

Although the cultural differences in foregroundversus background information seem robust, giventhe growing literature, the linkages between the cul-tural neural differences in analytic versus holisticprocessing and everyday life remain unclear. Someassociations with social behavior have emerged, butthey have relied solely on behavioral evidence. Forexample, with respect to social influence, Miyamotoand Wilken (2010) found that Americans assigned as“leader” tend to rely more on an analytic style com-pared to their Japanese counterparts. Using cartoonfigures, Masuda et al. (2008) found that the inter-pretation of the emotions of the foreground faceswas more strongly influenced by the emotions of thebackground faces in Japanese participants when com-pared to Westerners. Japanese participants judged theforeground faces as more “happy” or more “sad”(there was a marginal effect for “anger”) when thebackground faces expressed the congruent emotion.Furthermore, by tracking eye movements, they foundJapanese participants initially glanced at the fore-ground faces, but more quickly began viewing thebackground faces.

We utilized the N400 to extend the findings ofcultural differences in processing context using neu-ral measures suggestive of deep, semantic processing.The N400 is an ERP that has been shown to be sen-sitive to processing semantic relationships (Holcomb& Neville, 1991; Kutas & Federmeier, 2011; Kutas& Hillyard, 1980). The increased magnitude of theN400 associated with unexpected or incongruentsemantic events may reflect the increased cognitiveprocessing necessary to integrate anomalous semanticinformation or meaning (e.g., Holcomb, 1993). Forexample, Goto, Ando, Huang, Yee, and Lewis (2010)presented participants with a background scene suchas a parking lot. Then, they “popped” a central object

onto the background image that was either congru-ent (e.g., a car) or incongruent (e.g., a crab). ForAsian-Americans, the magnitude of the N400 wasgreater when an incongruent object was superimposedupon the background image than when the objectwas congruent. This was not found for EuropeanAmericans, suggesting their relative inattention tobackground information. Evidence for cultural dif-ferences was particularly compelling, since all par-ticipants viewed the background before the fore-ground object was placed, and yet cultural differencesemerged in how the two groups processed the semanticrelationship between the background and foreground.

Na and Kitayama (2011) also relied on the N400 tolook at cultural differences in context sensitivity tovisual processing. If individuals with interdependentself-construals are more sensitive to situational influ-ences of behavior, then they should be less likelyto spontaneously infer traits from an initial behavior.As evidence of greater spontaneous trait activation,they found that European Americans showed greatermagnitude of the N400 to antonyms of implied traitscompared to Asian-Americans. This study importantlyprovided evidence for cultural differences in semanticprocessing of social contextual information.

We sought to extend previously explored culturaldifferences in neurocognitive processes to includesensitivity to affective relationships across a broadvisual field. More specifically, we investigated whetherAsian-Americans would be more likely to processincongruities in affect between facial expressionsand visual scenes. The literature on cultural differ-ences in social behavior contains examples of EastAsians being more sensitive to social information,such as knowledge (Haberstroh, Oyserman, Schwarz,Kuhnen, & Ji, 2002) and emotional perspectives ofothers (Cohen & Gunz, 2002) compared to EuropeanNorth Americans. Like Masuda et al. (2008), we basedour study on the premise that situational appraisalsof emotion (Mesquita & Leu, 2007) are at least par-tially culturally determined. That is, individuals readtheir landscape for cues of social constraint (Gilbert &Malone, 1995; Na & Kitayama, 2011), suggesting thatthe emotional landscape can be to some extent cultur-ally determined. Since European Americans tend to bemore independent, with thoughts and actions emergingfrom the self and relatively independent of others, theymay process less social information from the back-ground compared to East Asian Americans. On theother hand, East Asians who tend to have more inter-dependent self-construals would likely utilize contextsto process social information (Choi & Nisbett, 1998;Markus & Kitayama, 1991; Morris & Peng, 1994).This builds upon the budding literature on culturalneural differences in emotion which has focused on

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CULTURE AND N400 65

the localization of affective facial recognition andprocessing (e.g., Chiao et al., 2008; Derntl et al.,2009).

Since other research has found the N400 to be sen-sitive to semantic incongruity of emotion (Deveney &Pizzagalli, 2008; Ishii, Kobayashi, & Kitayama, 2010;Leuthold, Filik, Murphy, & Mackenzie, 2012), weadapted the protocol by Goto et al. (2010) to inves-tigate whether East Asian Americans show greatersemantic processing of facial emotion in the contextof incongruent background affective scenes comparedto European Americans. We chose human faces dis-playing emotion as foreground stimuli and juxtaposedemotion of faces on a variety of positive or nega-tive affective background scenes. Based on previousresearch (Goto et al., 2010; Masuda et al., 2008), weexpected East Asian Americans would display greaterN400s than European Americans when processingemotionally incongruent faces and backgrounds andno difference with respect to congruent faces andbackgrounds.

In addition, based on previous studies of self-construal and cognition using neural measures (Gotoet al., 2010; Hedden et al., 2008; Lewis et al.,2008; Na & Kitayama, 2011) the relationship betweenthe N400 and self-construal was investigated. Sinceself-construal, or how one sees oneself in relationto others (Markus & Kitayama, 1991), is inherentlysocial in its focus, its relationship to the process-ing of social background and foreground informationshould be salient. However, the reported relation-ships with interdependence versus independence havebeen somewhat inconsistent to date (see Kitayama &Uskul, 2011). Therefore, we anticipated a relation-ship between self-construal and semantic processingof context in this study, then empirically determinedthe specific direction.

METHOD

Participants

Participants were 46 undergraduate students, ages18–25 years, from the Claremont colleges, a con-sortium of West Coast liberal arts colleges. Allparticipants were right-handed, monoracial, and hadnormal or corrected-to-normal vision. Of 55 orig-inally sampled participants, nine were eliminated(three Asian-Americans and six European Americans)due to excessive ocular and muscle artifacts dur-ing the ERP session or incomplete survey data.Remaining in the study were 23 Asian-Americansand 23 European Americans. Half of the participants

were self-identified European Americans (12 womenand 11 men) and half were self-identified EastAsian Americans (13 women and 10 men). EuropeanAmerican students were born and raised in the UnitedStates. All Asian-Americans were of East Asiandescent and were either born in the United Statesor immigrated to the United States before the ageof 8. Eligibility and group categorization were deter-mined using a preliminary online survey that includedquestions about ethnicity and handedness, as well astwo distracter questions. Participants also filled outa demographics survey at the end of the experimentthat was used to further characterize our subject pool.Participants were recruited from introductory psy-chology courses, Asian-American psychology courses,and advertisements. Informed consent was obtainedin compliance with the Pomona College InstitutionalReview Board. After completion of the experiment,participants were compensated $15 or given subjectpool credit for the session.

Materials and apparatus

Self-construal survey

Participants were administered a 30-item version ofthe Self-Construal Scale (SCS) developed by Singelis(1994). This 7-point Likert scale consists of 15 inde-pendent items, such as “I enjoy being unique anddifferent from others in many respects,” and 15 inter-dependent items, such as “I feel my fate is intertwinedwith the fate of those around me.” Treating indepen-dent and interdependent self-construals as orthogo-nal constructs, independent and interdependent self-construal scores were derived by calculating theaverage response to items from each subscale sepa-rately. Although often used in cross-national compar-isons, the SCS and other measures like it have beensuccessfully used to discriminate populations withina country (see Oyserman, Coon, & Kemmelmeier,2002).

Visual stimuli

Stimuli consisted of 100 unique affective scenesfrom the International Affective Pictures System(Lang, Bradley, & Cuthbert, 2008). Scenes wereselected for their human social nature. Half of theaffective scenes were negative (valence: M = 3.1,SD = 0.62; arousal: M = 5.0, SD = 0.75) andhalf were positive (valence: M = 7.4; SD = 0.31,arousal: M = 7.4, SD = 0.91). Superimposed upon

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66 GOTO ET AL.

the center of the affective scenes were faces selectedfrom Matsumoto and Ekman (1989). Eight faceswere used in this study (consisting of all combina-tions of smiling or frowning expressions, male orfemale faces, and Japanese and European Americanfaces). Two emotions, sadness and happiness, wereselected given the robust results for these two emo-tions in Masuda et al. (2008). Focal faces weresuperimposed upon the affective scenes such that50 trials consisted of affectively congruent combina-tions (i.e., happy face superimposed upon a positivescene or a sad face superimposed upon a negativescene) and 50 trials consisted of incongruent combina-tions (i.e., happy face superimposed upon a negativescene or a sad face superimposed upon a positivescene).

The stimuli were presented on a Dell 22-inch com-puter monitor centrally positioned at eye level, 75 cmfrom the observer’s eyes (Dell Corp., Round Rock,TX, USA). The affective scenes subtended 95 squaredegrees of visual angle. The superimposed focal faceswere presented in the center of the affective scenesand subtended an average of 4.2 " 4.2 degrees ofvisual angle. E-Prime (Psychology Software ToolsInc., Pittsburgh, PA, USA) was used to program thepresentation of the stimuli.

Procedure

Five practice trials were followed by four sets of25 stimuli. Between each set, subjects were allowedto take a break for as long as they felt necessary.Participants were presented with a fixation cross (“+”)in the center of the computer screen for an intervalbetween 500 and 1500 ms. Then, an affective scenewas presented for 600 ms. This was followed by thepresentation of a face superimposed upon the affectivescene for 600 ms. The emotional face was either con-gruent or incongruent with the affective scenes. Thesequence of trials was randomized within each blockfor each subject.

The incidental orienting task for participants was todetermine whether the emotion expressed on the focalface was happy or sad. Participants were given tworesponse boxes, one for each hand. If the focal face was“happy,” they were instructed to press “1” simultane-ously with both hands. If the focal face was “sad,” theywere instructed to press “2.” If undecided, then theywere instructed to press “3.” Reaction time and accu-racy were recorded. After the experimental procedure,all participants completed the SCS, followed by demo-graphic questions.

Electroencephalography (EEG) acquisition

EEG was recorded using the Electrical GeodesicsInc. 256-channel Hydrocel Geodesic Sensor Netsoaked in a potassium chloride saline surfactantsolution (Electrical Geodesics Inc., Eugene, OR,USA). Each electrode of the net used an AgCl-plated carbon-fiber pellet connected to a gold pinby a lead-shielded wire. The net was connected toa DC-coupled high impedance (200 M!) Net Amps300 amplifier. Electrodes were adjusted to impedancesbelow 50 k!, which preserves the signal integrity(<0.1% error) for a system of this design (Ferree, Luu,Russell, & Tucker, 2001). The analog voltages wereamplified by a factor of 1000 and a bandpass filterof 0.3–100 Hz was used during recording. Voltageswere digitized with a 16-bit A/D converter at 250 Hz.Recording electrodes were referenced to the partici-pant’s vertex electrode.

ERP analysis

NetStation 4.3 software was used to process the rawEEG data (Geodesics Inc., Eugene, OR, USA). Rawdata were filtered using a 0.3–30 Hz bandpass filter.ERPs were epoched from 200 ms before the onsetof the background scene to 1600 ms after its onset.Trials were rejected if they contained ocular artifacts(greater than 70 µV difference between eye channels)or more than five bad channels (100 µV differencebetween successive samples or reaching amplitudesof 200 µV). Subjects with fewer than 20 artifact-freetrials in either the congruent or incongruent condi-tions were eliminated from analyses in the study.For the Asian-Americans, there remained, on aver-age, 36 trials (out of 50) for ERP analyses in thecongruent condition and 37 trials (out of 50) for theincongruent condition per subject. For the EuropeanAmericans, there remained, on average, 37 trials (outof 50) for ERP analyses in the congruent conditionand 37 trials (out of 50) for the incongruent conditionper subject. For the ERPs in response to the affectivescene, all trials were averaged together, re-referencedto the average reference, and baseline corrected to the200 ms period preceding the background stimulus.For the ERPs in response to the face superimposedupon the affective scene, trials for each condition(congruent and incongruent) were averaged separately,re-referenced to the average reference, and baselinecorrected to the 200 ms period preceding the onset ofthe affective scene.

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CULTURE AND N400 67

RESULTS

Behavioral performance

As expected, the behavioral results suggested no obvi-ous differences in the degree to which the Asian-Americans and European Americans behaviorallyresponded to the facial emotion identification task(see Tables 1 and 2). In order to orient partici-pants during the N400 task, subjects performed anincidental perceived emotion judgment of the facesthat were superimposed on the background affectivescenes. For the happy faces, there was no differencein accuracy between the Asian-Americans (M = 0.95;SD = 0.06) and European Americans (M = 0.95;SD = 0.08), t(44) = 0.04, ns; d = 0. There was also nodifference in accuracy for the sad faces between Asian-Americans (M = 0.95, SD = 0.06) and EuropeanAmericans (M = 0.95; SD = 0.08), t(44) = 0.04;ns; d = 0. For happy judgments, there was no dif-ference in reaction times between Asian-Americans(M = 633 ms; SD = 152 ms) and European Americans(M = 618 ms; SD = 110 ms), t(44) = 0.37, ns;d = 0.11. Similarly, for the sad judgments, there wasno difference in reaction times between the Asian-Americans (M = 647 ms; SD = 149 ms) and EuropeanAmericans (M = 633 ms; SD = 118 ms), t(44) = 0.34,ns; d = 0.10.

In addition, there were no differences in reac-tion times between the two groups for the congru-ent face–affective scene pairings (Asian-Americans:M = 636 ms; SD = 160 ms; European Americans:

TABLE 1Accuracy of facial emotion judgment

Asian-Americans(n = 23)

European Americans(n = 23)

Facial emotion M (SD) M (SD)

Happy 0.95 (0.06) 0.95 (0.08)Sad 0.95 (0.06) 0.95 (0.08)

TABLE 2Mean reaction times for facial emotion judgment

(in milliseconds)

Asian-Americans(n = 23)

European Americans(n = 23)

Trial type M (SD) M (SD)

Facial emotionHappy 633 (152) 618 (110)Sad 647 (149) 633 (118)

Background stimuliCongruent 636 (160) 631 (111)Incongruent 627 (113) 630 (114)

M = 631 ms; SD = 111 ms), t(44) = 0.14, ns;d = 0.04 or the incongruent face–affective scene pair-ings (Asian-Americans: M = 627 ms; SD = 113 ms;European Americans: M = 630 ms; SD = 114 ms),t(44) = 0.11, ns; d = 0.03.

Furthermore, the Asian-Americans did not showa significant difference in reaction times betweenthe congruent (M = 636 ms; SD = 160 ms)and incongruent face–affective scene pairings(M = 627 ms; SD = 113 ms), t(22) = 0.67, ns;d = 0.06. Similarly, the European Americans didnot show a significant difference in reaction timesbetween the congruent (M = 631 ms; SD = 111 ms)and incongruent (M = 630 ms; SD = 114 ms) face–affective scene pairings, t(22) = 0.08, ns; d = 0.01.Finally, there were no significant correlations betweenthe behavioral responses and the self-construal scores(r < 0.15).

Electrophysiological analyses

In order to investigate the electrophysiological pro-cessing of the social affective task, ERPs were createdfor the period from 200 ms before the onset of theaffective, background scene through 1600 ms follow-ing its onset. The background affective scene waspresented alone for 600 ms, followed by the facebeing superimposed upon the background scene foranother 600 ms (see Figure 1). In order to investi-gate group differences in processing the backgroundscene, repeated measures ANOVAs were conductedon the mean amplitude for 70 electrodes spanning theextent of the electrode net coverage for six tempo-ral windows (0–100 ms, 100–200 ms, 200–300 ms,300–400 ms, 400–500 ms, and 500–600 ms) span-ning the duration of the presentation of the back-ground affective scene alone. Ethnicity was enteredas a between-subject variable and a Greenhouse–Geisser correction was used for violation of sphericity.For each of the temporal windows, there was nomain effect of ethnicity [0–100 ms: F(1) = 2.5, ns;100–200 ms: F(1) = 2.7, ns; 200–300 ms: F(1) = 2.2,ns; 300–400 ms: F(1) = 1.6; 400–500 ms: F(1) = 1.8;500–600 ms: F(1) = 2.0].

The shape of the ERPs resulting from the facesuperimposed upon the background was very sim-ilar to those reported by Goto et al. (2010) (seeFigure 1). There was a peak negativity occurringaround the time the face was superimposed upon theaffective background. The ERP became increasinglypositive, except for a brief negative deflection occur-ring around 400 ms post-onset of the face upon theaffective background. This negativity characterized the

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68 GOTO ET AL.

21

Cz

81

90

Pz

1.0 S

Cz

81

90

Pz

Fz

Incongruent

Congruent

Asian-Americans European Americans

N400

1600 ms600 ms0–200 1600 ms600 ms0–200

FaceBackground+ FaceBackground+

Figure 1. ERPs for centroposterior midline electrodes for Asian-Americans and European Americans. Voltage is plotted as a function of time,200 ms before the onset of the affective scene to 1600 ms post-onset. N400 is shaded. Notice the greater negative response of Asian-Americansto the incongruent condition centered on 400 ms after the onset of the face superimposed upon the affective background scene (1000 ms afterthe onset of the background scene). Figures are smoothed for presentation purposes.

N400. The scalp topography of the N400 was alsosimilar to that reported by Goto et al. (2010) (seeFigure 2). The N400 was maximal at midline cen-troposterior electrodes and was largely symmetrical.Furthermore, no significant correlations were foundbetween N400 amplitude and behavioral performance(i.e., accuracy and reaction time) in the facial affectjudgment task (r < 0.1).

Hypothesis testing

In order to quantify the N400, we measured the meanamplitude of the vertex (Cz) and two immediately pos-terior electrodes (# 81 and #90) across a 350—450 mslatency window following the onset of the face,which was superimposed upon the affective scene.The amplitudes of the three electrodes were averaged

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CULTURE AND N400 69

Asian-Americans European Americans

0.72

–0.78

N400

Figure 2. Scalp topography of voltage difference between the incongruent and congruent conditions for the Asian-Americans (left scalptopography) and the European Americans (right scalp topography). Greater negativity for the incongruent condition is indicated by blue coloring.Notice the greater N400 during the incongruent condition for Asian-Americans along the centroposterior midline electrode sites. Color-codedscale is in µV.

and entered into a 2 (ethnicity) " 2 (congruent–incongruent condition) repeated measures ANOVA.There was an ethnicity by condition interaction,F(1,44) = 5.8, p = .02; "2

p = 0.12 (see Figure 3).The Asian-Americans showed greater negativity toincongruent trials than congruent trials, t(22) = 2.2,p = .035; d = 0.94. In contrast, the EuropeanAmericans did not show a difference in amplitudeacross the two conditions, t(22) = 1.0, ns; d = #0.43.Furthermore, subtracting the amplitude during the con-gruent trials from the amplitude during the incongruenttrials resulted in significantly larger N400 differencewave amplitude for the Asian-Americans than forthe European Americans, t(44) = 2.2, p = .035;d = 0.31. There was neither a main effect of ethnicity,F(1,44) = 0.46, ns; "2

p = 0.01, nor a congruencycondition, F(1,44) = 1.9, ns; "2

p = 0.04.

Relationship between self-construaland ERPs

We tested whether European American participantswould display greater independent self-construal,

whereas Asian-American participants would displaygreater interdependent self-construal. Retaining allitems of the SCS resulted in a Cronbach’s alpha of0.81 for the independent subscale and deleting oneitem resulted in an alpha of 0.70 for the interde-pendent subscale, suggesting moderately high reli-ability for both scales. On the independent sub-scale, European Americans (M = 4.5, SD = 0.79,range = 2.8) were not significantly more indepen-dent than Asian-Americans (M = 4.3, SD = 0.75,range = 2.7), t(44) = 0.87, ns; d = 0.26), andon the interdependent subscale, Asian-Americans(M = 4.7, SD = 0.72, range = 1.9) were not signifi-cantly more interdependent than European Americans(M = 4.6, SD = 0.57, range = 2.3), t(44) = 0.52, ns;d = 0.15.

Correlational analyses were conducted betweenthe SCS independent and interdependent subscales2

and the N400 amplitude of the difference wave. The

2 Composite scores representing unidimensionality(collectivism–individualism) were also calculated and analyzed (seeChiao et al., 2009), resulting in a consistent, but weaker correlationwith the N400; r = 0.22; p = .14.

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2.00

CongruentIncongruent

1.00

0.00

Mea

n N

400

ampl

itude

(µV

)

–1.00

–2.00

Asian-Americans European Americans

Figure 3. Mean amplitude for 350–450 ms latency window following the onset of the face for electrodes Cz, 81, and 90 for Asian-Americansand European Americans. Greater negativity for the incongruent condition is evident for only the Asian-Americans. There is no group differencein amplitude for the congruent condition.

10.00

5.00

0.00

–5.00

–10.00

–15.00

–20.00

3.00 3.50 4.00

Singelis interdependent self-construal

Relationship between interdependent self-construal and N400 amplitude

N40

0 am

plitu

de (µ

V)

4.50 5.00 5.50 6.00

Figure 4. Scatter plot of the relationship between interdependent self-construal and N400 amplitude. The figure shows that greater inter-dependent self-construal is associated with increasing magnitude or negativity of the N400 (AA = Asian-American; EA = EuropeanAmerican).

greater the magnitude of the N400 incongruity effect,the higher the interdependent self-construal score(r = 0.29, p = .05; see Figure 4). No relationshipwas found between the N400 and the independent

self-construal score (r = 0.09, ns). When EuropeanAmericans and Asian-Americans were analyzed sep-arately, the results were similar, but lacked statisticalpower.

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CULTURE AND N400 71

DISCUSSION

We investigated cultural differences in the seman-tic processing of emotionally expressive facessuperimposed upon background affective scenesusing the N400. Resulting N400s were measuredto infer the amount of semantic processing of therelationship between the foreground facial expressionand the affective background scene. As expected, forEast Asian Americans larger N400s resulted whenthe affective background scenes were followed byaffectively incongruent foreground facial expressions.In contrast, no such N400 incongruity effect wasfound for European American participants. To thebest of our knowledge, this is the first study toshow cultural differences in brain activity associ-ated with semantic processing of visually presentedaffective relationships. Additionally, interdependentself-construal was positively related to the magnitudeof the N400.

The cultural differences that emerged in the mag-nitude of the N400 are consistent with previous cog-nitive, neural, and theoretical literature emphasizingthe different degree to which context influences pro-cessing of information across cultures. Our findingscan be explained by East Asian Americans invok-ing a holistic cognitive style (Nisbett & Miyamoto,2005; Nisbett et al., 2001). Within this framework,Asian-American’s perceptual processing is consideredto be context dependent, with relatively greater atten-tion allocated to the relationship between the focalfacial expression and the background affective context.In contrast, European American’s analytical percep-tual processing is considered to be more context inde-pendent, with the foreground facial expression beingprocessed independently of the background affectivecontext. These findings are consistent with previousempirical work using behavioral measures (e.g., Chuaet al., 2005; Ji et al., 2000; Kitayama et al., 2003;Masuda & Nisbett, 2001; Mauss & Butler, 2010),as well as growing evidence using neural measures(Hedden et al., 2008; Ishii et al., 2010; Jenkins, Yang,Goh, Hong, & Park, 2010; Lewis et al., 2008; Na& Kitayama, 2011). Interestingly, these neural stud-ies suggest that culture may not only reside in one’senvironment, but also within the brain.

Utilizing socially rich stimuli that require com-plex processing of contextual situations broadens theapplicability of the N400 to include investigationsof cultural differences in deeper affective process-ing. Originally, the N400 design was used to mea-sure the semantic processing of linguistic stimuli,but more recently, the N400 has been shown to be

sensitive to semantic processing across a variety ofdomains, including visually presented nonlinguisticstimuli (e.g., Ganis & Kutas, 2003; Goto et al., 2010;West & Holcomb, 2002), as well as auditory (Ishiiet al., 2010) and visually (Zhang, Guo, Lawson, &Jiang, 2006) presented affective stimuli. This studysupports the extant literature and extends our under-standing of the sensitivity of the N400 to include cul-tural differences in the semantic processing of visuallypresented affective stimuli.

Our findings are also consistent with Masuda et al’s.(2008) study of foreground and background facialemotions and yet extend our understanding in impor-tant ways. Masuda found that Japanese participants,but not European North American participants, wereaffected by contextual faces when perceiving emo-tions of the foreground faces. We found that com-plex affective background scenes also differentiallyaffect the perception of foreground facial emotion byculture. Furthermore, if the N400 is a reflection ofprocessing of semantic relationships, affective or oth-erwise, then our data suggest that Asian-Americansmust be processing the meaning of the relationshipbetween the affective valence of the background sceneand the facial expression to a greater extent thanEuropean Americans (see Kutas & Federmeier, 2011for a review of the N400 literature). In contrast toMasuda’s paradigm, which may simply elicit judg-ments of similarity or difference between backgroundand foreground facial expressions, this study relieson more complex emotional scenes and specificallyinvestigates cultural differences in semantic affectiveprocessing.

As anticipated, we found that interdependent self-construal was positively correlated with the N400.Those with higher interdependence displayed greaterN400s. This suggests that individuals with highinterdependent scores processed the affective incon-gruity between the affective background and theemotional faces more than did individuals withlow interdependent scores. No relationship emergedwith independence. Finding a relationship betweenindependent/interdependent self-construal and neuralactivity is consistent with a growing body of litera-ture in cultural neuroscience (see Kitayama & Uskul,2011 for a review). Given a unidimensional con-ceptualization of self-construal, more interdependenceand less independence are typically found to be cor-related with neural activity associated with greateruse of contextual information. Treating the constructsof interdependence and independence as orthogonal,more interdependence (Lewis et al., 2008) or lessindependence (Goto et al., 2010) is correlated with

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neural activity associated with greater use of con-textual information. Separating the constructs yieldsresults where sometimes interdependence seems tobe the driving force and sometimes independence.By operationalizing the constructs orthogonally, weseek to refine our understanding of culture in addi-tion to the neural mechanisms that vary by culture.At this point, these distinctions might be related tomeasurement concerns stemming from the self-reportof interdependency/independency (Heine, Lehman,Peng, & Greenholtz, 2002) or to differences in thenature of the tasks. Perhaps the current relationshipwith interdependent self-construal stems from the taskbeing social in nature (i.e., reading faces) as opposedto nonsocial (i.e., reading objects) as in Goto et al.(2010).

The focus on East Asian Americans rather thanEast Asians living in Asia carries many benefits andchallenges. First, this study importantly broadens thegeneralizability of the analytic and holistic frame-work, suggesting that cultural differences in cognitionare robustly found in diasporic samples (Goto et al.,2010; Hedden et al., 2008; Lewis et al., 2008; Na &Kitayama, 2011). Second, the relationship betweeninterdependent self-construals (and not race) points tothe usefulness of understanding cultural difference asgreater than skin-deep.

Furthermore, in this study Asian-Americans werenot different from European Americans in impor-tant ways. Given that the Asian sample was drawnfrom an educational, residential setting that demandshigh, persistent fluency in the dominant Americanculture, perhaps the unexpected similarities in interde-pendent and independent construals should have beenexpected. However, this conclusion precludes a poten-tially interesting test of self-construal mediating therelationship between cultural/racial group and neuralprocesses (e.g., Lewis et al., 2008; Na & Kitayama,2011). Future studies should continue to investigate thephenomenon in other diasporic samples to understandthe role of acculturation (see Hedden et al., 2008).

In addition, no between-group differences werefound on behavioral measures of accuracy and reactiontime. This is consistent with the cultural neuroscienceliterature and attests to the sensitivity of neural mea-sures in investigations of culture. Behavioral measuresreflect the sum total of a series of computationalprocesses, whereas neural measures can isolate theseprocesses in time and space. Therefore, behavioral dataand electrophysiological data may appear to be con-tradictory without actually invalidating one another.In sufficiently simple visual tasks, especially incidentalorienting tasks, such as ascribing happiness or sad-ness to a face, as used in this study, different cultural

groups may be able to perform equally well while atthe same time process the stimuli differently (Gotoet al., 2010; Hedden et al., 2008; Ishii et al., 2010).We see the emergent neural differences but lack ofbehavioral differences as illustrating the importanceof neural measures in cultural research due to theirgreater sensitivity. Furthermore, cultural differencesin neural activity that are independent of behavioraldifferences are a unique contribution of the field ofcultural neuroscience, which differs from cultural psy-chology where behavioral differences are expected.

Finally, our use of the semantic processing ofstandardized affective stimuli provides unique oppor-tunities for understanding the intersections of cul-ture, the brain, and emotion. This study complementsother research that has focused on the amygdala’srole in viewing facial affect (Adams et al., 2009;Chiao et al., 2008) and facial recognition of emotion(Derntl et al., 2009) across cultures. Given that theN400 has been associated with temporal lobe activity(Lau, Phillips, & Poeppel, 2008; Van Petten & Luka,2006), our data are suggestive of neural activity inthe temporal lobe that manifests cultural differencesin the semantic processing of affect. However, it isimportant to recognize that cultural differences in pro-cessing information are likely to occur before semanticprocessing of focal–background relationships. Giventhe work on cultural differences in visual attention incognitive (e.g., Boduroglu et al., 2009; Chua et al.,2005) and neural (e.g., Hedden et al., 2008) studies,it is probably the case that the relatively late seman-tic incongruity indexed by the N400 is the result ofattentional processes that direct one’s attention to pro-cessing objects across the visual field. Indeed, Heddenet al. (2008) have identified using functional mag-netic resonance imaging (fMRI) cultural differencesin frontal and parietal attentional networks that mayinfluence the semantic processing of objects in ourvisual field. Presumably, these attentional networksinfluence the subsequent semantic processing of stim-uli in the visual field. Unfortunately, fMRI lacks thetemporal resolution necessary to determine when thisactivity occurs relative to the N400. ERP methodologyis ideal for identifying how early cultural differencescan be detected in processing visual information. Thisstudy was not designed to investigate this issue, and theoverlapping ERPs for the background and foregroundobjects complicate the identification of how earlyculture influences visual processing. Future researchshould focus on understanding the stages of processingwhere culture has an impact. Combined EEG/fMRIor source estimation EEG studies should be able toprovide greater insight into these issues. Furthermore,although this study did not investigate the valence

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of affect, future studies should systematically inves-tigate cultural differences in the semantic processingof positive versus negative backgrounds and facialexpressions beyond “happy” and “sad” (Eid & Diener,2001; Na & Kitayama, 2011) toward a more com-prehensive understanding of emotion, culture, and thebrain.

In conclusion, the current finding of neural culturaldifferences in semantic processing of social informa-tion is significant. It contributes to a growing bodyof evidence suggesting that culture should be con-ceptualized as residing within the brain, as well asoutside of the brain. For example, reading others interms of whether their emotion is appropriate given thesituation might closely resemble the complicated judg-ments that bicultural individuals encounter in dailylife (e.g., Yip, 2009). Our study importantly extendsthe complexity of context to include socioemotionalcontexts wherein cultural differences are frequentlyfound.

Original manuscript received 14 August 2011Revised manuscript accepted 9 October 2012

First published online 1 November 2012

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