Culture, education, and the attribution of physical causality

Two studies investigated the impact of culturally instilled folk theories on the perception of physical events. In Study 1, Americans and Chinese with no formal physics education were found to emphasize different causes in their explanations for eight physical events, with Americans attributing them more to dispositional factors (e.g., weight) and less to contextual factors (e.g., a medium) than did Chinese. In Study 2, Chinese Americans' identity as Asians or as Americans was primed before having them explain the events used in Study 1. Asian-primed participants endorsed dispositional explanations to a lesser degree and contextual explanations to a greater degree than did American-primed participants, although priming effects were observed only for students with little physics education. Together, these studies suggest that culturally instilled folk theories of physics produce cultural differences in the perception of physical causality.     

Perceiving Stability in a Changing World: Combining Shots and Intergrating Views in Motion Pictures and the Real World

One of the central debates in the study of media concerns the relationship between our perception of real-world events and mediated events such as motion pictures. A number of authors have argued convincingly that both rely on similar natural perceptual processes. Here we extend this argument by reviewing research on scene perception showing that the similarity between film and natural perception includes a common tendency to perceive events as continuous in the face of large view-to-view inconsistencies. This research shows that observers are frequently unable to detect large unexpected changes that occur between views, even in objects within their focus of attention. This is true both in mediated stimuli such as motion pictures and during staged real-world interactions. Thus, perception of continuity may be an inference that proceeds in spite of impossible between-view changes, both in motion pictures and real-world scenes.     

I am against us? Unpacking cultural differences in ingroup favoritism via dialecticism

The authors proposed a novel explanation for cultural differences in ingroup favoritism (dialecticism) and tested this hypothesis across cultures/ethnicities, domains, and levels of analysis (explicit vs. implicit, cognitive vs. affective). Dialecticism refers to the cognitive tendency to tolerate contradiction and is more frequently found among East Asian than North American cultures. In Study 1, Chinese were significantly less positive, compared to European Americans, in their explicit judgments of family members. Study 2 investigated ingroup attitudes among Chinese, Latinos, and European Americans. Only Chinese participants showed significant in-group derogation, relative to the other groups, and dialecticism (Dialectical Self Scale) was associated with participants' in group attitudes. Study 3 manipulated dialectical versus linear lay beliefs; participants primed with dialecticism showed more negative, explicit ingroup attitudes. Although ingroup disfavoring tendencies were more prevalent among Chinese across studies, they may be a reflection of one's culturally based lay beliefs rather than deep-rooted negative feelings toward one's ingroup.     

Culture, attention, and emotion

This research provides experimental evidence for cultural influence on one of the most basic elements of emotional processing: attention to positive versus negative stimuli. To this end, we focused on Russian culture, which is characterized by brooding and melancholy. In Study 1, Russians spent significantly more time looking at negative than positive pictures, whereas Americans did not show this tendency. In Study 2, Russian Latvians were randomly primed with symbols of each culture, after which we measured the speed of recognition for positive versus negative trait words. Biculturals were significantly faster in recognizing negative words (as compared with baseline) when primed with Russian versus Latvian cultural symbols. Greater identification with Russian culture facilitated this effect. We provide a theoretical discussion of mental processes underlying cultural differences in emotion research.     

Cross-cultural differences in item and background memory: examining the influence of emotional intensity and scene congruency

After viewing a scene, individuals differ in what they prioritise and remember. Culture may be one factor that influences scene memory, as Westerners have been shown to be more item-focused than Easterners (see Masuda, T., & Nisbett, R. E. (2001). Attending holistically versus analytically: Comparing the context sensitivity of Japanese and Americans. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81, 922–934). However, cultures may differ in their sensitivity to scene incongruences and emotion processing, which may account for cross-cultural differences in scene memory. The current study uses hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) to examine scene memory while controlling for scene congruency and the perceived emotional intensity of the images. American and East Asian participants encoded pictures that included a positive, negative, or neutral item placed on a neutral background. After a 20-min delay, participants were shown the item and background separately along with similar and new items and backgrounds to assess memory specificity. Results indicated that even when congruency and emotional intensity were controlled, there was evidence that Americans had better item memory than East Asians. Incongruent scenes were better remembered than congruent scenes. However, this effect did not differ by culture. This suggests that Americans’ item focus may result in memory changes that are robust despite variations in scene congruency and perceived emotion.     

When Is Perception Top‐Down and When Is It Not? Culture,Narrative, and Attention

Previous findings in cultural psychology indicated that East Asians are more likely than North Americans to be attentive to contextual information (e.g., Nisbett & Masuda, 2003 ). However, to what extent and in which conditions culture influences patterns of attention has not been fully examined. As a result, universal patterns of attention may be obscured, and culturally unique patterns may be wrongly assumed to be constant across situations. By carrying out two cross‐cultural studies, we demonstrated that (a) both European Canadians and Japanese attended to moving objects similarly when the task was to simply observe the visual information; however, (b) there were cultural variations in patterns of attention when participants actively engaged in the task by constructing narratives of their observation (narrative construction). These findings suggest that cultural effects are most pronounced in narrative construction conditions, where the need to act in accordance with a culturally shared meaning system is elicited.     

Is there a natural order for expressing semantic relations?

All languages rely to some extent on word order to signal relational information. Why? We address this question by exploring communicative and cognitive factors that could lead to a reliance on word order. In Study 1, adults were asked to describe scenes to another using their hands and not their mouths. The question was whether this home-made "language" would contain gesture sentences with consistent order. In addition, we asked whether reliance on order would be influenced by three communicative factors (whether the communication partner is permitted to give feedback; whether the information to be communicated is present in the context that recipient and gesturer share; whether the gesturer assumes the role of gesture receiver as well as gesture producer). We found that, not only was consistent ordering of semantic elements robust across the range of communication situations, but the same non-English order appeared in all contexts. Study 2 explored whether this non-English order is found only when a person attempts to share information with another. Adults were asked to reconstruct scenes in a non-communicative context using pictures drawn on transparencies. The adults picked up the pictures for their reconstructions in a consistent order, and that order was the same non-English order found in Study 1. Finding consistent ordering patterns in a non-communicative context suggests that word order is not driven solely by the demands of communicating information to another, but may reflect a more general property of human thought.     

Pursuit of comfort and pursuit of harmony: culture, relationships, and social support seeking

This research examined whether people from collectivistic cultures are less likely to seek social support than are people from individualistic cultures because they are more cautious about potentially disturbing their social network. Study 1 found that Asian Americans from a more collectivistic culture sought social support less and found support seeking to be less effective than European Americans from a more individualistic culture. Study 2 found that European Americans' willingness to seek support was unaffected by relationship priming, whereas Asian Americans were willing to seek support less when the relationship primed was closer to the self. Study 3 replicated the results of Study 2 and found that the tendency to seek support and expect social support to be helpful as related to concerns about relationships. These findings underscore the importance of culturally divergent relationship patterns in understanding social support transactions.     

Looking away from death: Defensive attention as a form of terror management

Previous research has suggested that the physical aspects of human nature in general, and physical human frailties in particular become disagreeable and repugnant following death primes. The current research tested this hypothesis in two studies using an eye-tracking methodology. Participants were subliminally primed with death or with a control word and then viewed a series of arrays containing four pictures each, during which their eye-movements were monitored. In Study 1, the arrays included pictures of physical injury or neutral objects, and in Study 2 pictures of physical injury, threatening images, and neutral objects. The results indicated that in both studies death primes significantly decreased gaze duration towards pictures of physical injury, and did not have a significant effect on gaze duration towards neutral images. However, in Study 2 death primes increased gaze duration towards threatening images. The discussion examines the role of motivated unconscious attention in terror management processes.     

Feature and Configuration in Face Processing: Japanese Are More Configural Than Americans

Previous work suggests that Asians allocate more attention to configuration information than Caucasian Americans do. Yet this cultural variation has been found only with stimuli such as natural scenes and objects that require both feature‐ and configuration‐based processing. Here, we show that the cultural variation also exists in face perception—a domain that is typically viewed as configural in nature. When asked to identify a prototypic face for a set of disparate exemplars, Japanese were more likely than Caucasian Americans to use overall resemblance rather than feature matching. Moreover, in a speeded identity‐matching task, Japanese were more accurate than Americans in identifying the spatial configuration of features (e.g., eyes). Together, these findings underscore the robustness of culture’s influences on cognition.     

Eye movement assessment of selective attentional capture by emotional pictures

The eye-tracking method was used to assess attentional orienting to and engagement on emotional visual scenes. In Experiment 1, unpleasant, neutral, or pleasant target pictures were presented simultaneously with neutral control pictures in peripheral vision under instruction to compare pleasantness of the pictures. The probability of first fixating an emotional picture, and the frequency of subsequent fixations, were greater than those for neutral pictures. In Experiment 2, participants were instructed to avoid looking at the emotional pictures, but these were still more likely to be fixated first and gazed longer during the first-pass viewing than neutral pictures. Low-level visual features cannot explain the results. It is concluded that overt visual attention is captured by both unpleasant and pleasant emotional content.     

Culture and aesthetic preference: comparing the attention to context of East Asians and Americans

Prior research indicates that East Asians are more sensitive to contextual information than Westerners. This article explored aesthetics to examine whether cultural variations were observable in art and photography. Study 1 analyzed traditional artistic styles using archival data in representative museums. Study 2 investigated how contemporary East Asians and Westerners draw landscape pictures and take portrait photographs. Study 3 further investigated aesthetic preferences for portrait photographs. The results suggest that (a) traditional East Asian art has predominantly context-inclusive styles, whereas Western art has predominantly object-focused styles, and (b) contemporary members of East Asian and Western cultures maintain these culturally shaped aesthetic orientations. The findings can be explained by the relation among attention, cultural resources, and aesthetic preference.     

Scene perception and memory revealed by eye movements and receiver-operating characteristic analyses: Does a cultural difference truly exist?

Cultural differences have been observed in scene perception and memory: Chinese participants purportedly attend to the background information more than did American participants. We investigated the influence of culture by recording eye movements during scene perception and while participants made recognition memory judgements. Real-world pictures with a focal object on a background were shown to both American and Chinese participants while their eye movements were recorded. Later, memory for the focal object in each scene was tested, and the relationship between the focal object (studied, new) and the background context (studied, new) was manipulated. Receiver-operating characteristic (ROC) curves show that both sensitivity and response bias were changed when objects were tested in new contexts. However, neither the decrease in accuracy nor the response bias shift differed with culture. The eye movement patterns were also similar across cultural groups. Both groups made longer and more fixations on the focal objects than on the contexts. The similarity of eye movement patterns and recognition memory behaviour suggests that both Americans and Chinese use the same strategies in scene perception and memory.     

Scene perception and memory revealed by eye movements and receiver-operating characteristic analyses: does a cultural difference truly exist?

Cultural differences have been observed in scene perception and memory: Chinese participants purportedly attend to the background information more than did American participants. We investigated the influence of culture by recording eye movements during scene perception and while participants made recognition memory judgements. Real-world pictures with a focal object on a background were shown to both American and Chinese participants while their eye movements were recorded. Later, memory for the focal object in each scene was tested, and the relationship between the focal object (studied, new) and the background context (studied, new) was manipulated. Receiver-operating characteristic (ROC) curves show that both sensitivity and response bias were changed when objects were tested in new contexts. However, neither the decrease in accuracy nor the response bias shift differed with culture. The eye movement patterns were also similar across cultural groups. Both groups made longer and more fixations on the focal objects than on the contexts. The similarity of eye movement patterns and recognition memory behaviour suggests that both Americans and Chinese use the same strategies in scene perception and memory.     

Children's artistic responses to musical intervals

In one experiment, White South African boys drew pictures in response to four musical intervals. In the second, the subjects were of both sexes and drawn from White, urban Black, and rural Black populations. Six intervals were used. Drawing content was similar cross-culturally. Consonances were perceived as generally positive; dissonances, generally negative. There was also an activity dimension. Children in a lower grade drew more concrete pictures than did those in a higher grade, regardless of age. Even young listeners were fairly consistent in their responses. This suggests that perception of musical meaning is a universal rather than culturally based phenomenon.     

Improving Attention in Old Age

The aim of this study was to examine whether a mindful intervention, based on noticing distinctions, could be used to improve the attention of older individuals. Participants were randomly assigned to one of four attention interventions. In the mindfulness groups, participants studying a set of pictures were told to notice either three or five distinctions. In the control groups, participants were either told to pay attention or were not given any directions related to attention before exposure to the set of pictures. The results indicated that those who viewed the stimuli in terms of distinctions were able to remember significantly more pictures than did those in the control groups. Distinction drawing also increased liking for the stimuli. The findings suggest that if older individuals want to increase attention and recall, rather than focus their attention, they may want to find ways to vary their attention.     

A conceptual model of cultural predictors of anxiety among Japanese American and part-Japanese American adolescents

A model integrating Japanese ethnicity, cultural identity, and anxiety was developed and assessed in Japanese American and part-Japanese American high school seniors (N = 141). Using measures from the Hawaiian High Schools Health Survey, the model incorporated the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory, the Major Life Events Scale, and the Japanese Culture Scale (JCS). Japanese American adolescents scored higher on the JCS and reported fewer anxiety symptoms than part-Japanese American adolescents. Predictors for anxiety were being Japanese American versus part-Japanese American, income, and culturally intensified events. A significant interaction of behavior by self-identification was obtained. The model had good overall fit, suggesting that cultural identity formation may contribute to anxiety experienced particularly by adolescents of mixed heritage.     

Effects of semantic priming on visual encoding of pictures

We investigated the effects of semantic priming on initial encoding of briefly presented pictures of objects and scenes. Pictures in four experiments were presented for varying durations and were followed immediately by a mask. In Experiments 1 and 2, pictures of simple objects were either preceded or not preceded by the object's category name (e.g., dog). In Experiment 1 we measured immediate object identification; in Experiment 2 we measured delayed old/new recognition in which targets and distractors were from the same categories. In Experiment 3 naturalistic scenes were either preceded or not preceded by the scene's category name (e.g., supermarket). We measured delayed recognition in which targets and distractors were described by the same category names. In Experiments 1-3, performance was better for primed than for unprimed pictures. Experiment 4 was similar to Experiment 2 in that we measured delayed recognition for simple objects. As in Experiments 1-3, a prime that preceded the object improved subsequent memory performance for the object. However, a prime that followed the object did not affect subsequent performance. Together, these results imply that priming leads to more efficient information acquisition. We offer a picture-processing model that accounts for these results. The model's central assumption is that knowledge of a picture's category (gist) increases the rate at which visual information is acquired from the picture.     

Reducing implicit prejudice: Matching approach/avoidance strategies to contextual valence and regulatory focus

Two general strategies for reducing prejudice are to approach equality and to avoid prejudice. The current research investigated the importance of matching two factors, contextual valence and regulatory focus, on the efficacy of these two strategies in reducing implicit prejudice. The findings demonstrate that although an approach strategy is more effective in decreasing prejudice on the Implicit Association Test in a positive rather than a negative context, an avoidance strategy is more effective in decreasing prejudice in a negative rather than a positive context (Study 1). In addition, the results show that although an approach strategy is more effective in decreasing prejudice when a promotion rather than a prevention focus is primed, an avoidance strategy is more effective in reducing prejudice when a prevention rather than a promotion focus is primed (Study 2). The implications of these findings for current interventions aimed at decreasing implicit prejudice are discussed.     

Attending holistically versus analytically: comparing the context sensitivity of Japanese and Americans.

Much research indicates that East Asians, more than Americans, explain events with reference to the context. The authors examined whether East Asians also attend to the context more than Americans do. In Study 1, Japanese and Americans watched animated vignettes of underwater scenes and reported the contents. In a subsequent recognition test, they were shown previously seen objects as well as new objects, either in their original setting or in novel settings, and then were asked to judge whether they had seen the objects. Study 2 replicated the recognition task using photographs of wildlife. The results showed that the Japanese (a) made more statements about contextual information and relationships than Americans did and (b) recognized previously seen objects more accurately when they saw them in their original settings rather than in the novel settings, whereas this manipulation had relatively little effect on Americans.