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障碍。情绪感知缺陷会导致心理健康治疗费用，并在更广泛的范围内产生重大的社会和经济成本。无法感知情绪会对职业和个人领域产生深远的影响，这是由于工人生产力的损失和社会功能的中断。然而，科学家缺乏对情绪感知及其缺陷的机械理解。这是在社会功能的这一主要方面进行治疗和预防的一个关键障碍。我建议，通过跨文化的透镜，使用过程为基础的理论方法来检查情绪感知，可以实现跨越这一关键障碍。文化比较可以提供一个透镜的规范变化，通常是在一个单一的文化背景下模糊。这项研究旨在揭示影响情绪感知的潜在机制是如何受到情境约束和文化变量的。我将研究两个过程：心理化（即，人们对内在感觉做出多少推断）和动作感知（即，有多少人认同情境行为）。长期以来，人们一直认为，“健康”是普遍定义的参与心理化在情绪感知。然而，我之前的研究发现了一种文化（纳米比亚的辛巴族），而情况并非如此。我计划 从辛巴族文化背景中继续研究个体，并扩展到中国文化背景中，进一步探讨正常情绪感知的文化差异机制。与目标1，我将更好地表征文化差异在心理化和动作识别通过分析自然语言的使用过程中的情绪感知和心理任务。与目标2，我将调查的文化差异的神经基础，在心智化使用动态神经影像检查一个区域的功能，锚定的网络支持的心理状态推断的背内侧皮层（dmPFC）。我预测，人们在文化背景下，心理状态的语言使用发生更频繁（目标1），dmPFC将更强劲地激活，在域特定（情感）和域一般（心智化）的任务（目标2）。通过研究情绪感知作为一个复杂的社会认知行为的文化框架内，我的目标是揭示情绪感知的潜在机制，是一致的跨文化背景和那些不同的。这将使我能够建立一个更机械的情绪感知模型，可以告诉我们这些过程如何出错，产生混乱的情绪感知。在这项研究的基础上，未来的干预措施可以根据一个机械的帐户。在美国，对行动认同度高的个人的治疗（例如，自闭症患者）可以通过理解主要依赖于其他文化中的行为识别的交易来获得信息。

 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.