Journal
NEUROPSYCHOLOGIA
Volume 51, Issue 7, Pages 1177-1186Publisher
PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD
DOI: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2013.03.018
Keywords
Cross-cultural comparisons; Empathy; Pain processing; Emotion; fMRI
Funding
- National Science Foundation [BCS-0720312, BCS-0722326]
- National Science Foundation East Asia Pacific Summer Institute Fellowship
- Korea Science and Engineering Foundation
- Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education [R205B080027]
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Cultures vary in the extent to which they emphasize group members to habitually attend to the needs, perspectives, and internal experiences of others compared to the self. Here we examined the influence that collectivistic and individualistic cultural environments may play on the engagement of the neurobiological processes that underlie the perception and processing of emotional pain. Using cross-cultural fMRI, Korean and Caucasian-American participants passively viewed scenes of Others in situations of emotional pain and distress. Regression analyses revealed that the value of other-focusedness was associated with heightened neural response within the affective pain matrix (i.e. anterior cingulate cortex and insula) to a greater extent for Korean relative to Caucasian-American participants. These findings suggest that mindsets promoting attunement to the subjective experience of others may be especially critical for pain-related and potentially empathic processing within collectivistic relative to individualistic cultural environments. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available