Previous research has indicated that anxious individuals are more prone to evaluate ambiguous information as negative compared to non-anxious individuals. The feedback-related negativity (FRN) component of event-related brain potential (ERP) has been shown to be sensitive to outcome evaluation. The current ERP study aimed to test the hypothesis that the FRNs associated with ambiguous outcomes and negative outcomes are different between high trait-anxiety (HTA) and low trait-anxiety (LTA) individuals. The FRN was measured as a difference wave created across conditions. We found significantly different FRN responses between high-anxious and low-anxious participants in ambiguous outcome condition, as well as in negative outcome condition. Moreover, the HTA group’s FRN responses under the ambiguous outcome condition were larger than the negative outcome condition. Nevertheless, the FRN following neutral outcome did not show any difference between the two groups. The present results support the idea that there is link between individual differences in anxiety and ambiguous outcome evaluation, which possibly reflects the adaptive function of anxiety. Additionally, the results indicate that the mechanisms underlying the evaluation of neutral outcomes and ambiguous outcomes might be different from each other.

How do people interpret the meaning of a smile? Previous studies with Westerners have found that both the eyes and the mouth are crucial in identifying and interpreting smiles, yet less is known about Easterners. Here we reported that when asking the Chinese to judge the Duchenne and non-Duchenne smiles as either real or fake, their accuracy and sensitivity were negatively correlated with their individualism scores but positively correlated with their collectivism scores. However, such correlations were found only for participants who stated the eyes to be the most useful references, but not for those who favored the mouth. Moreover, participants who favored the eyes were more accurate and sensitive than those who favored the mouth. Our results thus indicate that Chinese who follow the typical Eastern decoding process of using the eyes as diagnostic cues to identify and interpret others' facial expressions and social intentions, are particularly accurate and sensitive, the more they self-report greater collectivistic and lower individualistic values.

The embodied view of language processing holds that language comprehension involves the recruitment of sensorimotor information, as evidenced by the somatotopic representation of action verbs in the motor system. However, this review has not yet been examined in logographic scripts such as Chinese, in which action verbs can provide explicit linguistic cues to the effectors (arm, leg, mouth) that conduct the action (hit, jump, drink). We compared the somatotopic representation of Chinese verbs that contain such effector cues and those that do not. The results showed that uncued verbs elicited similar somatotopic representation in the motor and premotor cortex as found in alphabetic scripts. However, effector-cued verbs demonstrated an inverse somatotopic pattern by showing reduced activation in corresponding motor areas, despite that effector-cued verbs actually are rated higher in imageability than uncued verbs. Our results support the universality of somatotopic representation of action verbs in the motor system. E arly neuroimaging studies on human language production and comprehension focus primarily on the classical language network in the left inferior frontal and superior temporal cortex, such as Wernicke's and Broca's areas 1 . However, growing evidence from patient and neuroimaging studies have shown that language processing activates a much more complex and widely distributed network [2][3][4][5][6] . Increasingly research has reported a semantic category-specificity effect, such that specific semantic categories such as objects, relations, and actions might be represented in particular brain regions 3,7-11 . In particular, the processing of action verbs has been found to be associated with the frontal and motor cortex [12][13][14][15][16][17][18] .Studying how action verbs are represented in the brain is particularly interesting among various specific semantic categories, because it connects language processing to another debating theory in cognition, that is, embodied cognition 7,8 . The embodied view of language processing proposes that the internal representation of the action, which is related to the motor system, plays a key role in language comprehension 19 . In line with this proposal, a rich body of literature has linked the motor and language systems and shown that motor simulation is an automatic and necessary component of meaning representation 3,20 . A crucial case is the somatotopic representation of action verbs [21][22][23] . For example, Hauk and colleagues found that reading action verbs denoting leg, arm and face actions activated the corresponding motor and premotor cortex areas in a somatotopic pattern 21 . Similar somatotopic patterns were also found when participants listening to the action-related sentences 24 , reading idioms with action-related words 25 , reading literal or metaphoric action sentences 26 , and reading idioms [27][28][29][30][31] . In addition, imaging actions and listening action sounds demonstrated a body-part specific somatotopic representation 32,33 .Moreove...

Kinship terms have been found to be highly diverse across languages. Here we investigated the brain representation of kinship terms in two distinct populations, native Chinese and Caucasian English speakers, with a five-element kinship identification (FEKI) task. The neuroimaging results showed a common extensive frontal and parietal lobe brain activation pattern for different kinship levels for both Chinese and Caucasian English speakers. Furthermore, Chinese speakers had longer reaction times and elicited more fronto-parietal brain networks activation compared to English speakers in level three (e.g., uncle and nephew) and four (e.g., cousin), including an association between the middle frontal gyrus and superior parietal lobe, which might be associated with higher working memory, attention control, and social distance representation load in Chinese kinship system processing. These results contribute to our understanding of the representation of kinship terms in the two languages.

Previous studies with Westerners have found that both the mouth and eyes are crucial in identifying and interpreting smiles. We proposed that Easterners (e.g., Chinese and Japanese) evaluate the role of the mouth and eyes in smiles differently from Westerners. Individuals in collectivistic Eastern society heavily rely on information from the eyes to identify and interpret the meaning of smiles.