Basic mechanisms of cultural relativity in emotion perception

 描述(由申请人提供)：情绪感知困难是一种关键的跨诊断损害。情绪感知缺陷导致心理健康治疗成本，并在更广泛的范围内招致重大的社会和经济成本。无法感知情绪可能会对职业和个人领域产生深远的影响，因为员工的生产力会下降，社交功能会受到干扰。然而，科学家们缺乏对情绪感知及其缺陷的机械性理解。在社会职能的这一主要方面，这是治疗和预防的关键障碍。我认为，跨越这一关键障碍可以通过跨文化的视角，使用基于过程的理论方法来考察情绪知觉。文化比较可以提供一种视角，了解在单一文化背景下通常被掩盖的规范差异。这项拟议的研究旨在揭示影响情绪感知的潜在机制是如何受到背景限制和文化差异的。我将考察两个过程：意念化(即，人们对内心感受进行了多少推断)和行动感知(即，人们对情景行为的识别程度)。长期以来，人们普遍认为，“健康”的定义是情绪感知过程中的意念投入。然而，我之前的研究发现，有一种文化(纳米比亚的辛巴文化)并非如此。我计划这样做 继续从兴巴文化语境中研究个体，并扩展到中国文化语境中，进一步探索正常情绪知觉机制中的文化变异。在目标1中，我将通过分析情绪感知和心理任务中自然语言的使用，更好地表征心理和动作识别中的文化差异。在目标2中，我将通过检查支撑精神状态推理网络的一个区域-背内侧皮质(DmPFC)的功能，来研究在使用动态神经成像进行精神化过程中文化差异的神经基础。我预测，在心理状态语言使用更频繁的文化环境中(目标1)，dmPFC将在领域特定(情绪)和领域一般(心智)任务(目标2)中被更有力地激活。通过在文化框架内将情绪感知视为一种复杂的社会认知行为，我的目的是揭示跨文化背景下一致和不同的情绪感知的潜在机制。这将使我能够建立一个更机械的情绪感知模型，它可以告诉我们这些过程如何出错，从而产生无序的情绪感知。在这项研究的基础上，未来的干预措施可以根据机械性的描述进行定制。在美国，对行动认同度高的个人(例如，自闭症患者)的治疗可以通过理解在其他文化中主要依赖于行动认同感的交易来实现。

 DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Difficulty in emotional perception is a key trans-diagnostic impairment. Emotion perception deficits contribute to mental health treatment costs and incur significant social and economic costs, more broadly. Inability to perceive emotion can have a profound impact on professional and personal realms, due to losses in worker productivity and disruptions on social functioning. Yet scientists lack of mechanistic understanding of emotion perception and deficits therein. This represents a critical barrier to treatment and prevention within this major facet in social functioning. I propose that surmounting this critical barrier can be achieved by examining emotion perception through a cross-cultural lens, using a process-based theoretical approach. Cultural comparisons can provide a lens on normative variation that is typically obscured within a single cultural context. The proposed research aims to reveal the ways in which the underlying mechanisms that contribute to emotion perception are contextually bound and culturally variable. I will examine two processes: mentalizing (i.e., how much people make inferences about the inner feelings) and action perception (i.e., how much people identify situated behaviors). It has long been assumed that "health" is universally defined by the engagement of mentalizing during emotion perception. Yet my prior research identified a culture (the Himba of Namibia) where this is not the case. I plan to continue study individuals from the Himba cultural context, and expand to a Chinese cultural context, to further probe cultural variation in the mechanisms of normal emotion perception. With aim 1, I will better characterize cultural variation in mentalizing and action identification through analysis of natural language use during emotion perception and mentalizing tasks. With aim 2, I will investigate the neural underpinnings of cultural variation in mentalizing using ambulatory neuroimaging by examining the functioning of one region that anchors the network underpinning mental state inference the dorsomedial cortex (dmPFC). I predict that people in cultural contexts in which mental state language use occurs more frequently (Aim 1), the dmPFC will be more robustly activated, during both domain specific (emotion) and domain general (mentalizing) tasks (Aim 2). By examining emotion perception as a complex act of social cognition within a cultural framework, I aim to reveal the underlying mechanisms of emotion perception that are consistent across cultural contexts and those that differ. This will allow me t build a more mechanistic model of emotion perception that can inform our understanding of how these processes can go awry to produce disordered emotion perception. Based on this research, future interventions could be tailored based on a mechanistic account. In the United States, treatment for individuals high in action identification (e.g., individuals with Autism) coud be informed by understanding transactions that primarily rely on action identification in other cultures.