Distinct effects of self-construal priming on empathic neural responses in Chinese and Westerners

Jiang, Chao; Varnum, Michael E. W.; Hou, Yuting; Han, Shihui

doi:10.1080/17470919.2013.867899

Cited by 38 publications

(34 citation statements)

References 43 publications

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“…Indeed, these findings are consistent with work by Stellar, Manzo, Kraus, and Keltner (2012) demonstrating that within the United States, individuals from lower socioeconomic contexts show more compassion towards a peer undergoing a stressful job interview than do those from higher socioeconomic contexts. Other studies suggest that although there are cultural similarities in the patterns of brain activity associated with empathizing with another person's pain, there are also differences (e.g., de Greck et al, 2012; Jiang et al, 2014). For example, whereas Chinese participants showed a pattern of brain activity suggesting that they were regulating their emotions when empathizing with a familiar angry target, German participants showed a pattern of brain activity suggesting that they were assuming the perspective of the angry target (de Greck et al, 2012).…”

Section: Previous Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Focusing on the negative: Cultural differences in expressions of sympathy.

Koopmann-Holm¹,

Tsai²

2014

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

109

128

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Feeling concern about the suffering of others is considered a basic human response, and yet, we know surprisingly little about the cultural factors that shape how people respond to the suffering of another person. To this end, we conducted four studies that tested the hypothesis that American expressions of sympathy focus on the negative less and positive more than German expressions of sympathy, in part because Americans want to avoid negative states more than Germans do. In Study 1, we demonstrate that American sympathy cards contained less negative and more positive content than German sympathy cards. In Study 2, we show that European Americans want to avoid negative states more than Germans do. In Study 3, we demonstrate that these cultural differences in “avoided negative affect” mediate cultural differences in how comfortable Americans and Germans felt focusing on the negative (vs. positive) when expressing sympathy for the hypothetical death of an acquaintance's father. To examine whether greater avoided negative affect results in lesser focus on the negative and greater focus on the positive when responding to another person's suffering, in Study 4, American and German participants were randomly assigned to one of two conditions: (1) to “push negative images away” (i.e., increasing desire to avoid negative affect), or (2) to “pull negative images closer” to themselves (i.e., decreasing desire to avoid negative affect). Participants were then asked to pick a card to send to an acquaintance whose father had hypothetically just died. Across cultures, participants in the “push negative away” condition were less likely to choose sympathy cards with negative (vs. positive) content than were those in the “pull negative closer” condition. Together, these studies suggest that cultures differ in their desire to avoid negative affect, and that these differences influence the degree to which expressions of sympathy focus on the negative (vs. positive). We discuss the implications of these findings for current models of sympathy, compassion, and helping.

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Section: Previous Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Focusing on the negative: Cultural differences in expressions of sympathy.

Koopmann-Holm¹,

Tsai²

2014

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

109

128

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…Finally, the growing work on cultural neuroscience might offer novel perspectives on how to approach and measure self-construal (Ambady, & Bharucha, 2009;Jiang, Varnum, Hou, & Han, 2014;Kim, & Sasaki, 2014;Ma, & Han, 2011).…”

Section: The Agency View and Methodological Issues In Self-construal mentioning

confidence: 99%

Toward a Better Understanding of Self-Construal Theory: An Agency View of the Processes of Self-Construal

Voyer

Franks

2014

Review of General Psychology

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LSE has developed LSE Research Online so that users may access research output of the School. Copyright © and Moral Rights for the papers on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyright owners. Users may download and/or print one copy of any article(s) in LSE Research Online to facilitate their private study or for non-commercial research. You may not engage in further distribution of the material or use it for any profit-making activities or any commercial gain. You may freely distribute the URL (http://eprints.lse.ac.uk) of the LSE Research Online website. This document is the author's final accepted version of the journal article. There may be differences between this version and the published version. You are advised to consult the publisher's version if you wish to cite from it.Running head: SELF-CONSTRUAL THEORY: AN AGENCY VIEW This article offers a novel perspective on self-construal theory. Self-construal concerns how individuals understand who they are in relation to the broad set of cultural influences in which they live. We look at the nature and antecedents of self-construal, and characterize it as a self-process, rather than self-knowledge. Integrating work from the literature on social and evolutionary psychology, and philosophy, we suggest that the differences between independent and interdependent self-construal are best understood from a self-agency perspective. This concerns how people assess whether they are the causes of an action and, if so, whether their causal role depends on other people. We introduce and discuss the roles of three different modalities of agency involved in agency assessment: implicit (sensorimotor), intermediate (self-related affordances), and explicit (reflective) self-agency. We offer a conceptual model on how self-agency relates to power, evolutionary motivations and to social and cultural affordances, in the formation of, and interaction with, different types of dominant independent and interdependent self-construals.Keywords: self-construal, self-agency, power, social and cultural affordances, social environment, evolutionary psychologyIn 1991, Markus and Kitayama published an article that focused on a fundamental question of psychology-namely, the relationship between the individual self and the social and cultural setting. This became one of the most influential articles of the decade, referred to by Devine and Brodish (2003, p. 200) as a 'modern classic in social psychology'; it is the fourth (see Footnote 1) most cited Psychological Review paper in the web of science (Anderson, 2011). Self-construal theory's original framing-the first systematic social psychological attempt to map the relationship between culture and the self-remains powerfully insightful today.Self-construal theory introduced a new way to understand the individual consequences of cross-cultural differences, in terms of their implications for the construal of the self. Relating the debates on Eastern versus Western values to the individual level, Markus and Kitayama (...

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“…We found four EEG studies in which cultural mindset was primed (Jiang et al 2013;Lin et al 2008;Sui et al 2013;Wang et al 2013a, b). In one study, Lin et al (2008) used ERPs to examine neural response to tasks which are congruent versus incongruent with the mental procedures that a cultural mindset brings to mind.…”

Section: Evidence From Eeg Studiesmentioning

confidence: 89%

“…This study suggests that an individualist mindset increases self-focus thereby enhancing the neural response to stimuli applied to the self. Jiang et al (2013) presented Western and Chinese participants with pictures showing a strangers' hand experiencing pain or no pain after priming them with either individualistic or collectivistic cultural mindset. Participants were asked to judge whether the unknown target felt pain.…”

Section: Evidence From Eeg Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Integrating culture-as-situated-cognition and neuroscience prediction models

et al. 2014

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The interface of mind, brain, culture, and behavior has provided rich ground for speculation, theorizing and empirical research. To date, theorizing has focused on between-country difference and much research has focused on quasiexperimental design in which groups are compared and the reasons for found differences imputed to be about the culture-brain interface. The authors of this paper argue for a somewhat different approach. We conceptualize culture as a set of human universals that are dynamically triggered in context. In doing so we integrate culture-as-situated-cognition (CSC) and neuroscience prediction (NP) models to yield a number of novel predictions: first, all societies include cues triggering both individualistic and collectivistic mindsets. Second, whether a mindset is triggered by a particular cue and what a triggered mindset implies for judgment, affective and behavioral response depends on spreading activation within the associative network activated at that moment. Third, universal features of culture are likely necessary from an evolutionary perspective; societies develop and sustain specific instantiations of these universals whether or not these particular instantiations were ever optimal, simply because they are the way 'we' do things. The CSC-NP model explains why models that assume fixed differences do not always find behavioral

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Distinct effects of self-construal priming on empathic neural responses in Chinese and Westerners

Cited by 38 publications

References 43 publications

Focusing on the negative: Cultural differences in expressions of sympathy.

Focusing on the negative: Cultural differences in expressions of sympathy.

Toward a Better Understanding of Self-Construal Theory: An Agency View of the Processes of Self-Construal

Integrating culture-as-situated-cognition and neuroscience prediction models

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