Cultural Neuroscience: A Historical Introduction and Overview

The integration of cognitive neuroscience with the study of culture emerged from independent ascensions among both fields in the early 1990s. This marriage of the two previously unconnected areas of inquiry has generated a variety of empirical and theoretical works that have provided unique insights to both partners that might have otherwise gone overlooked. Here, I provide a brief historical introduction to the emergence of cultural neuroscience from its roots in cultural psychology and cognitive neuroscience to its present stature as one of the most challenging but rewarding sub-disciplines to have come from the burgeoning growth of the study of the brain and behavior. In doing so, I overview some of the more studied areas within cultural neuroscience: language, music, mathematics, visual perception, and social cognition. I conclude with a discussion of how both parent fields (cognitive neuroscience and cultural psychology) have reciprocally benefited from the involvement of the other

Emotional expressions support the communication of social groups:A pragmatic extension of affective pragmatics

Expanding on linguistic frameworks for how speakers use speech acts to convey a variety of distinct meanings that are unachievable through words’ denotations alone, Andrea Scarantino (this issue) proposes the theory of affective pragmatics (TAP) as a means to explain what signalers do with their emo- tions to nonverbally convey nuance in meaning. The central tenets of TAP are that emotional expressions express more than just emotions and that these expressions function as Speech Act Analogs. Yet, as he suggests in his conclusion, TAP should extend to other nonlinguistic forms of communication as well. This proposition is reminiscent of past efforts by other scholars; such as Birdwhistell’s (1970) attempts to establish a nonverbal grammar. Yet, unlike those efforts, Scarantino succeeds by limiting his focus to emotional expressions, which might lay a foundation that serves as a common ingredient present throughout other various forms of communication. Here, we contend that the seeds for this may already exist in how people use information in emotional expressions to categorize social groups

The visibility of social class from facial cues

Social class meaningfully impacts individuals’ life outcomes and daily interactions, and the mere perception of one’s socioeconomic standing can have significant ramifications. To better understand how people infer others’ social class, we therefore tested the legibility of class (operationalized as monetary income) from facial images, finding across 4 participant samples and 2 stimulus sets that perceivers categorized the faces of rich and poor targets significantly better than chance. Further investigation showed that perceivers categorize social class using minimal facial cues and employ a variety of stereotype-related impressions to make their judgments. Of these, attractiveness accurately cued higher social class in self-selected dating profile photos. However, only the stereotype that well-being positively relates to wealth served as a valid cue in neutral faces. Indeed, neutrally posed rich targets displayed more positive affect relative to poor targets and perceivers used this affective information to categorize their social class. Impressions of social class from these facial cues also influenced participants’ evaluations of the targets’ employability, demonstrating that face-based perceptions of social class may have important downstream consequences

Negative emotion and perceived social class

People use stereotypes about the benefits of wealth and success to infer that rich people look happier than poor people. For instance, perceivers categorize smiling faces as rich more often than they categorize neutral faces as rich. Moreover, richer people’s neutral faces in fact display more positive affect than poorer people’s neutral faces. Applying these emotion stereotypes thus enables perceivers to accurately classify targets’ social class from their neutral faces. Extant research has left unexplained whether perceivers use broad differences in valence or specific emotions when judging others’ social class, however. We tested this here by examining how 4 negatively valenced emotions influence perceptions of social class: sadness, anger, disgust, and fear. Whereas sadness and anger relate to both stereotypes and actual correlates of lower social class (e.g., depression and hostility, respectively), no established links suggest that poorer people should express or experience greater disgust or fear. Consistent with stereotypes of lower-class people, targets expressing sadness and anger were categorized as poor or working class more often than neutral targets were. Targets expressing disgust and fear also looked lower class than neutral targets did, however. These combined findings therefore suggest that perceivers rely on valence differences rather than specific emotions to judge social class, indicating that the broad perception of low social class as a negative state (and high social class as a positive state) may drive face-based impressions of social class

Perceiving acculturation from neutral and emotional faces

Facial expressions of emotion convey more than just emotional experience. Indeed, they can signal a person’s social group memberships. For instance, extant research shows that nonverbal accents in emotion expression can reveal one’s cultural affiliation (Marsh, Elfenbein, & Ambady, 2003). That work tested distinctions only between people belonging to one of two cultural categories, however (Japanese vs. Japanese Americans). What of people who identify with more than one culture? Here we tested whether nonverbal accents might signal not only cultural identification but also the degree of cultural identification (i.e., acculturation). Using neutral, happy, and angry photos of East Asian individuals varying in acculturation to Canada, we found that both Canadian and East Asian perceivers could accurately detect the targets’ level of acculturation. Although perceivers used hairstyle cues when available, once we removed hair, accuracy was greatest for happy expressions—supporting the idea that nonverbal accents convey cultural identification. Finally, the intensity of targets’ happiness related to both their self-reported and perceived acculturation, helping to explain perceivers’ accuracy and aligning with research on cultural display rules and ideal affect. Thus, nonverbal accents appear to communicate cultural identification not only categorically, as previous work has shown, but also continuously

On the relationship between acculturation and intercultural understanding:Insight from the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test

Previous research has repeatedly demonstrated the importance of culture and cultural identification to interpersonal understanding. We aimed to apply the ideas from this domain to mental state reasoning, or theory of mind. We thus investigated the relationship between acculturation and inferring the mental states of other people within and across cultures by measuring Caucasian and East Asian participants’ accuracy in inferring the mental states of own- and other-ethnicity targets using the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test. As expected, Caucasian participants showed a significant ingroup advantage in inferring the mental states of own- versus other-ethnicity targets but no variation according to measures of acculturation. More important, East Asian residents of Canada showed greater accuracy for own- versus other-ethnicity targets—and their accuracy for Caucasian targets increased as a function of (i) the time they had lived in Canada, (ii) their experience interacting with Caucasians, (iii) increased endorsement of mainstream Canadian values, and (iv) decreased endorsement of their heritage culture’s values. These results suggest that cross-cultural understanding may be malleable to acculturation and cultural experience, highlighting the importance of further research on how people from different cultural perspectives come to understand each other and subsequently ameliorate cross-cultural misunderstanding

Democrats and Republicans Can Be Differentiated from Their Faces

Background: Individuals ’ faces communicate a great deal of information about them. Although some of this information tends to be perceptually obvious (such as race and sex), much of it is perceptually ambiguous, without clear or obvious visual cues. Methodology/Principal Findings: Here we found that individuals ’ political affiliations could be accurately discerned from their faces. In Study 1, perceivers were able to accurately distinguish whether U.S. Senate candidates were either Democrats or Republicans based on photos of their faces. Study 2 showed that these effects extended to Democrat and Republican college students, based on their senior yearbook photos. Study 3 then showed that these judgments were related to differences in perceived traits among the Democrat and Republican faces. Republicans were perceived as more powerful than Democrats. Moreover, as individual targets were perceived to be more powerful, they were more likely to be perceived as Republicans by others. Similarly, as individual targets were perceived to be warmer, they were more likely to be perceived as Democrats. Conclusions/Significance: These data suggest that perceivers ’ beliefs about who is a Democrat and Republican may be based on perceptions of traits stereotypically associated with the two political parties and that, indeed, the guidance of these stereotypes may lead to categorizations of others ’ political affiliations at rates significantly more accurate than chanc

Racial Bias in Judgments of Physical Size and Formidability: From Size to Threat

Black men tend to be stereotyped as threatening and, as a result, may be disproportionately targeted by police even when unarmed. Here, we found evidence that biased perceptions of young Black men\u27s physical size may play a role in this process. The results of 7 studies showed that people have a bias to perceive young Black men as bigger (taller, heavier, more muscular) and more physically threatening (stronger, more capable of harm) than young White men. Both bottom-up cues of racial prototypicality and top-down information about race supported these misperceptions. Furthermore, this racial bias persisted even among a target sample from whom upper-body strength was controlled (suggesting that racial differences in formidability judgments are a product of bias rather than accuracy). Biased formidability judgments in turn promoted participants\u27 justifications of hypothetical use of force against Black suspects of crime. Thus, perceivers appear to integrate multiple pieces of information to ultimately conclude that young Black men are more physically threatening than young White men, believing that they must therefore be controlled using more aggressive measures

The perceptive proletarian:Subjective Social Class Predicts Interpersonal Accuracy

Interpersonal accuracy correlates modestly across different domains. Although some research has explored factors that predict accuracy within specific domains of interpersonal judgment (e.g., social attributes), whether any variables might predict interpersonal accuracy generally across different domains remains in question. Subjective socioeconomic status (SES) has recently emerged as an important moderator of various social cognitions, such as contextual focus and empathic accuracy. Moreover, people lower in SES tend to show greater interpersonal engagement and attention; thus, we wondered whether individuals with lower subjective SES might exhibit superior interpersonal accuracy in multiple domains. Indeed, across four studies, we found that subjective SES inversely correlated with accuracy in three different domains of interpersonal accuracy: social attributes, situational affect, and emotion. These findings therefore demonstrate that subjective SES may predict broad interpersonal accuracy abilities and suggest that, despite modest relationships between different types of first impression accuracy, the correlates of such accuracy can still operate across domains

Beyond Categories:Perceiving Sexual Attraction from Faces

Although people can categorize others’ sexual orientation (e.g., gay/lesbian vs. straight) from their facial appearance, not everyone defines their sexual orientation categorically. Indeed, many individuals within the same sexual orientation category experience different degrees of own- and other-gender attraction. Moving beyond sexual orientation categories, we found that perceivers’ judgments of individuals’ sexual attraction correlated with those individuals’ self-reported degrees of attraction to women and men. Similar to past work on sexual orientation categories, facial affect cued sexual attraction in men whereas gender typicality cued sexual attraction in women. Moreover, asking participants to categorize the targets as ‘not straight’ versus ‘straight’ revealed a linear pattern distinct from the discrete category thresholds typical of other social groups (e.g., race). Facial appearance thus reveals nuances in sexual attraction that support sexual orientation categorizations. These findings refine understanding of social categorization more broadly