EAPSI: The Influence of Cultural Differences in Emotion Conceptual Knowledge on Emotion Perception

EAPSI：情绪概念知识的文化差异对情绪感知的影响

• 批准号: 1713960
• 负责人: Jeffrey Brooks
• 金额: $ 0.54万
• 依托单位: Brooks Jeffrey A
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Fellowship Award
• 财政年份: 2017
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2017-06-01 至 2018-05-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1713960&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: EAPSI; Influence; Cultural; Differences; Emotion

Upon seeing another person's face, we are able to effortlessly understand what emotions they might be feeling, and researchers in psychology and neuroscience have done a great deal of work to understand how we are able to understand this information so quickly. Recent theoretical insights hold that conceptual knowledge about emotion (e.g. how we think about and conceptualize emotions like anger) helps us rapidly understand the meaning of emotional facial expressions. This offers a possible explanation for cultural differences that have been observed between Western and East Asian (e.g. Japanese) people perceive emotions from facial expressions. This study will use neuroimaging (functional MRI) to measure the way that emotions such as "anger" and "fear" are represented in the brains of Japanese and American participants when they view emotional facial expressions. By also measuring each participant's concepts about emotion, we will be able to show the influence of emotion concepts on the way the brain processes emotion. We hypothesize that cultural differences in conceptual knowledge will be the strongest influence on cultural differences in emotion perception. This research will help scientists understand where cultural differences in emotion come from, and will also inform important debates about how emotions are processed in the brain. Aside from its theoretical contributions, this research will inform clinical research on conditions such as autism that reduce patients' ability to perceive emotions accurately. This study will be a collaborative effort between the fellow and Dr. Norihiro Sadato of the National Institute for Physiological Sciences in Okazaki, Aichi Prefecture, Japan. Dr. Sadato is an expert in the field of human neuroimaging with an enthusiasm for participating in cross-cultural psychological and neuroscientific research with scientists from the U.S.Recent accounts of emotion perception and person construal suggest that conceptual knowledge about emotion categories is able to provide a top-down influence on emotion perception before emotion categorizations have fully stabilized. This theoretical approach offers a new route for understanding cultural differences between Western and East Asian subjects in emotion perception. Thus far, many researchers have interpreted these differences as reflecting different cultural norms between American and Japanese participants in how emotions are interpreted and reported. However, we predict that the strongest predictor of cultural differences in emotion perception will be differences in emotion concept knowledge between cultures. To test this, we will perform an fMRI task that measures patterns of neural activity in response to emotional facial expressions, as well as a behavioral task in which we index the conceptual structure of emotion categories and similarity in how they are perceived. Using representational similarity analysis (RSA) we will index the correspondence between conceptual similarity, perceptual similarity, and neural pattern similarity. These results will inform ongoing debates in social and affective neuroscience on the way that emotion is processed and represented in the brain, and the way that cultural differences observed in behavior can manifest at the level of neural representation.This award, under the East Asia and Pacific Summer Institutes program, supports summer research by a U.S. graduate student and is jointly funded by NSF and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.

看到另一个人的脸后，我们能够毫不费力地了解他们可能会感受到的情绪，而心理学和神经科学领域的研究人员已经做了很多工作，以了解我们如何能够如此迅速地理解这些信息。最近的理论见解认为，关于情感的概念知识（例如，我们如何看待和概念化愤怒（例如愤怒））有助于我们快速理解情感面部表情的含义。这为西亚和东亚（例如日本人）人们从面部表情中感知情绪之间观察到的文化差异提供了一种可能的解释。这项研究将使用神经影像学（功能性MRI）来衡量日本和美国参与者看到情感表情时的大脑中代表“愤怒”和“恐惧”的情绪的方式。通过测量每个参与者对情感的概念，我们将能够展示情感概念对大脑处理情感方式的影响。我们假设概念知识的文化差异将是对情感感知文化差异的最大影响。这项研究将帮助科学家了解情感上的文化差异的来源，还将为有关如何在大脑中处理情绪的重要辩论提供信息。除了其理论贡献外，这项研究还将为诸如自闭症等疾病的临床研究提供信息，从而降低患者准确感知情绪的能力。这项研究将是日本Aichi县国家生理科学研究所的Norihiro Sadato博士之间的合作努力。 Sadato博士是人类神经影像领域的专家，热情地与来自美国情感感知的科学家一起参与跨文化心理和神经科学研究，并且人的约束表明，关于情感类别的概念知识能够提供一种提供一种能力。在情绪分类之前对情绪感知的自上而下的影响已经完全稳定。这种理论方法为了解情感感知中西方和东亚受试者之间的文化差异提供了新的途径。到目前为止，许多研究人员将这些差异解释为反映了美国和日本参与者之间在如何解释和报告情绪方面的不同文化规范。但是，我们预测，情感感知中文化差异的最强预测指标将是文化之间情感概念知识的差异。为了测试这一点，我们将执行一项功能磁共振成像任务，该任务可以响应情绪面部表情来衡量神经活动的模式，以及一项行为任务，在该任务中，我们将情感类别的概念结构和相似之处索引在一起。使用代表性相似性分析（RSA），我们将为概念相似性，感知相似性和神经模式相似性之间的对应关系索引。这些结果将为社会和情感神经科学的持续辩论提供有关情感在大脑中的处理和代表方式的方式，行为中观察到的文化差异的方式可以在神经代表的水平上表现出来。太平洋夏季学院计划支持美国研究生的夏季研究，并由NSF和日本促进科学学会共同资助。