Excerpt:
One of the most fundamental ways in which cultural beliefs, practices, and ideologies influence psychological processes is in the cognitive schema or self-construal style that people use to think about themselves and their relation to others. In particular, previous cultural psychology research has identified two main styles of self-construal: independent (or individualistic) and interdependent (or collectivistic). Individuals from independent cultures, such as the United States, tend to value their autonomy, uniqueness, freedom, and right to self-expression; whereas individuals from interdependent cultures, such as Japan, tend to prize social harmony, conformity, and adherence to group norms. In a 2007 study Zhu and his colleagues asked native Chinese and Western participants to decide whether a given trait adjective described themselves (self condition), their mother (mother condition), or an unrelated other (other condition), or if the adjective was pleasant or unpleasant (semantic condition). In Western participants, the medial prefrontal cortex, or the MPFC, a part of the brain implicated in processing self-referential information, was activated only in the self condition. In the Chinese participants, however, there was no difference in activity within the MPFC during processing of self and processing of the mother, indicating that Chinese participants who are more interdependent use the MPFC to represent both themselves and a close other. Because the self is core to our social and interpersonal interactions, this finding that culture can affect these representations at the neural level is striking and has important implications regarding how we represent ourselves and others across cultures.
Culture affects both what and how we see. ...
Click to read the rest of "The Mind in the World: Culture and the Brain" (Observer of the Association for Psychological Science).
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