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

在目前的项目中，我们专注于情绪言语的处理，并研究了日本人和美国人之间的一些心理差异。此外，我们还测试了各种认知差异，这些差异是我们在情绪信息处理方面的工作所提出的。这项工作的实证研究结果大致符合尼斯贝特及其同事最近提出的分析和整体处理之间的区别。一般来说，在美国文化背景下的人倾向于通过关注感知对象来表现出分析倾向，而在日本文化背景下的人则倾向于通过关注对象及其背景来表现出整体倾向。这一普遍假设表明，首先，在处理情绪言语时，美国人更可能注意言语内容而不是语调，而日本人更可能注意语调而不是言语内容。我们已经通过使用自发注意力的测量（即，Stroop干扰效应）和自动信息处理的测量（即，引发效应）。我们的研究还表明，在未来的研究中，重要的是要检查语言和认知之间的关系，以及跨文化认知差异的可变性和可塑性。当前工作的第二个主要成果涉及跨文化的非情感认知差异。为了支持上述假设，我们在一系列跨文化实验研究中表明，在感知几何图形时，美国人主要关注特定的物体，但日本人既关注这样的物体，也关注其周围的环境。

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.