How culture shapes our brain:Neural correlates of cultural differences in social cognition

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In times of globalization, mass migration and increasing intercultural exchange, social understanding between cultures gains tremendously in importance. While former studies suggest superior processing of social information of the own culture, this so called intracultural advantage may result in impaired emotion recognition and reduced empathy for people of other cultures. This discrepancy in the processing of social information is reflected in neural response patterns as well as in overt behavior. Thus, to improve social understanding between cultures, there is an urgent need to increase our knowledge on the effect of culture on social cognition. Our project will assess the intracultural advantage with a new approach, namely culture neuroscience, under two major aspects: a) the systematical investigation of the neural mechanisms underlying social cognition in example countries of two different cultural systems: Individualism and collectivism; b) the impact of social learning on the individual’s original patterns of social cognition. For the planed project, we will recruit four groups à 30 participants with a cross-sectional design: 1) Germans living in Germany (individualistic culture), 2) Chinese living in China (collectivistic culture), 3) Germans living in China (social learning of collectivistic values), and 4) Chinese living in Germany (social learning of individualistic values). The comparison of these four groups allows not only identifying cultural differences in social cognition, but also investigating whether these can be reduced by social learning in people living abroad. We plan on applying three functional magnetic resonance imaging-tasks targeting different aspects of social cognition. First, we will conduct an imitation task to explore neural correlates of social-cognitive processing. Second, for investigating the neural bases of social-emotional processing, we plan to apply an empathy task. Third, we will use an empathy-for-embarrassment task to examine neural responses to advanced social-emotional processing. For exploring the cultural differences in intracultural advantage, we use facial stimuli from both German and Chinese people. In addition, questionnaires on cultural orientation, intelligence, personality, emotional processing and related psychiatric syndromes will be applied to all participants.To date, although growing evidence on cultural differences in social cognition has been reported, the neural bases of these differences are still not clear. Furthermore, little is known about the effect of social learning on cultural differences in social cognition. The results of this project will present a comprehensive picture of cultural differences in social cognition between individualism and collectivism, contributing to our understanding of intercultural variations, and laying the basis to optimize cross-cultural interaction and to boost social integration.