Attention to Context: U.S. and Japanese Children's Emotional Judgments

Abstract

A growing number of studies suggest cultural differences in the attention and evaluation of information in adults (Masuda & Nisbett, 2001; Markus & Kitayama, 1991; Hedden, Ketay, Aron, Markus, & Gabrieli, 2008). One cultural comparison, between Westerners, such as Americans, and Easterners, such as the Japanese, suggest that Westerners typically focus on a central single object in a scene while Easterners often integrate their judgment of the focal object with surrounding contextual cues. There are few studies of whether such cultural differences are evident in children. This study examined 48 monolingual Japanese-speaking children residing in Japan and 48 monolingual English-speaking children residing in the U.S.A. (40 to 60 month-olds) in a task asking children to complete a picture by adding the proper emotional expression to a face. The key variable was the context and shift in context from the preceding trial for the same pictured individual. Japanese children were much more likely to shift their judgments with changes in context whereas children from the United States treated facial expression in a more trait-like manner, maintaining the same expression for the individual across contexts.

Cross-cultural differences in cognitive development: Attention to relations and objects

“…Overall, the results suggest that in a context where an interpretation in terms of a decontextualized object or in terms of a relation is possible, U.S. children will favor the object interpretation and Japanese children will favor the relation interpretation. This conclusion is similar to one suggested by Kuwabara and colleagues (2011) in a study of how Japanese and U.S. children interpret facial expressions; Japanese children interpreted emotional expressions in terms of the surrounding context (a happy or scary event), whereas U.S. children interpreted emotional expressions as a trait-like characteristic of the individual that persisted across contexts. Differential biases toward relational-based versus object-based interpretations might, over time, be expected to lead to pervasive cultural differences across a number of domains, including social judgments (Ji, 2008; Kanagawa, Cross, & Markus, 2001; Lockhart et al, 2008; Masuda et al, 2008) and verb learning (Choi, McDonough, Bowerman, & Mandler, 1999), as well as in relational matching and object search tasks.…”

“…The fact that cross-cultural differences are evident as young as preschool, a fact for which there is increasing evidence (Kuwabara et al, 2011; Moriguchi et al, 2012; Richland et al, 2010), also constrains hypotheses about their origins; the experiences that transmit these cultural biases must be pervasive in the lives of young children. Two possible lines of transmission that might be expected to influence early cognition are social interactions and language.…”

“…However, there is growing evidence of cross-cultural differences in adults in behavioral studies (Chiao & Blizinsky, 2010; Kim et al, 2010), cognitive studies (Chua, Boland, & Nisbett, 2005; Kitayama, Duffy, Kawamura, & Larsen, 2003; Masuda & Nisbett, 2001, 2006; Masuda et al, 2008; Nisbett & Masuda, 2003; Nisbett & Miyamoto, 2005; Nisbett, Peng, Choi, & Norenzayan, 2001), and neural studies (Han & Northoff, 2008; Hedden, Ketay, Aron, Markus, & Gabrieli, 2008). The developmental origins and timing of these differences is clearly important to understanding the role of culture in cognition and to understanding the developmental process more generally (e.g., see Kuwabara, Son, & Smith, 2011; Moriguchi, Evans, Hiraki, Itakura, & Lee, 2012; Richland, Chan, Morrison, & Au, 2010). Here, we report new evidence on cross-cultural differences in preschool children’s performances in two tasks: attention to relations in a relational matching task and attention to individual objects in a search task.…”

The Effects of Interdependent and Independent Priming on Western Participants’ Ability to Perceive Changes in Visual Scenes

“…To the extent that differences in holistic versus analytic thinking don't come about until children enter school, another possibility is that schooling plays an important role in shaping this aspect of cognition (but see Kuwabara & Smith, 2012 as well as Kuwabara, Son, & Smith, 2011, who show differences in holistic vs. analytic thinking amongst 4-year-old pre-school children).…”

Differential effects of bilingualism and culture on early attention: a longitudinal study in the U.S., Argentina, and Vietnam

“…The present focus on the role of cultural background is motivated by increasing studies suggesting how culture plays an important role in attention (e.g., Varnum et al, 2009; Yang et al, 2011; Yang, unpublished) and how individual’s cultural history shapes the way individuals notice and attend to visual cues and stimuli (Ji et al, 2000; Nisbett et al, 2001; Masuda and Nisbett, 2001, 2006; Kitayama et al, 2003; Nisbett, 2003; Nisbett and Masuda, 2003; Chua et al, 2005; Nisbett and Miyamoto, 2005; Varnum et al, 2009; Kuwabara et al, 2011; Kuwabara and Smith, 2012). In particular, an Eastern cultural advantage was found over Western cultures on children’s performance on overall attention, as measured by the ANT (Yang et al, 2011; Yang, unpublished).…”