Emotion and Culture: US-Japan comparisons on comprehension of emotional speech

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In the current project, we focused on the processing of emotional speech and examined a number of psychological differences that can be expected between Japanese and Americans. Furthermore, we also tested a variety of cognitive differences that are suggested from our work on emotional information processing. The empirical findings from this work correspond roughly to the distinction between analytic and holistic processing that has been recently proposed by Nisbett and colleagues. In general, individuals engaging in American cultural contexts tend to show an analytic tendency by focusing on a perceptual object, whereas those engaging in Japanese cultural contexts tend to show a holistic tendency by attending to such an object as well as its context. This general hypothesis suggests, first, that in processing of emotional speech, Americans are more likely to attend to verbal content than to vocal tone, whereas Japanese are more likely to attend to vocal tone than to verbal content. We have obtained support for this prediction by using both a measure of spontaneous attention (i.e., Stroop interference effect) and a measure of automatic information processing (i.e., priming effect). Our studies have also suggested that it is important in the future research to examine the relationship between language and cognition and both variability and malleability of cognitive differences across cultures. The second main outcome of the current work relates non-emotional cognitive differences across cultures. In support of the above-noted hypothesis, we showed in a series of cross-cultural experimental studies, that in perceiving geometric figures, Americans attend primarily to a specific object, but Japanese attend to both such an object and its surrounding context.