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

在全球化、大规模移民和日益增加的文化间交流的时代，文化间的社会理解变得极其重要。虽然以前的研究表明，对自己文化的社会信息的上级处理，这种所谓的文化内优势可能会导致情感识别受损，减少对其他文化的人的同情。这种社会信息处理的差异反映在神经反应模式和外显行为中。因此，为了增进不同文化之间的社会理解，迫切需要增加我们对文化对社会认知的影响的认识。我们的项目将从两个方面评估文化内优势：a）在两种不同文化体系的国家（个人主义和集体主义）中系统地调查社会认知的神经机制; B）社会学习对个人社会认知原始模式的影响。对于计划中的项目，我们将招募四组30名参与者，采用横断面设计：1）生活在德国的德国人（个人主义文化），2）生活在中国的中国人（集体主义文化），3）生活在中国的德国人（集体主义价值观的社会学习），4）生活在德国的中国人（个人主义价值观的社会学习）。这四个群体的比较不仅可以确定社会认知的文化差异，而且还可以调查这些差异是否可以通过生活在国外的人的社会学习来减少。我们计划应用三个功能磁共振成像任务，针对社会认知的不同方面。首先，我们将进行模仿任务，以探索社会认知处理的神经相关性。其次，为了研究社会情绪处理的神经基础，我们计划应用共情任务。第三，我们将使用对尴尬的同情任务来检查高级社会情绪处理的神经反应。为了探讨文化内优势的文化差异，我们使用了来自德国和中国人的面部刺激。此外，还将对所有参与者进行有关文化取向、智力、个性、情绪处理和相关精神病综合征的问卷调查。迄今为止，尽管越来越多的证据表明社会认知中的文化差异，但这些差异的神经基础仍然不清楚。此外，社会学习对社会认知中文化差异的影响知之甚少。本项目的研究结果将全面展示个人主义和集体主义在社会认知方面的文化差异，有助于我们理解跨文化差异，为优化跨文化互动和促进社会融合奠定基础。

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.