Author: Elin Bonyadi
Artist: Qiwen Liu
Editor: Zoe Beketova
Whether it’s smashing plates at a wedding or taking a nap at noon, people around the world have been brought up in very different cultures, with different experiences that have been shaped by these cultures. As well as influencing the customs we engage in, these cultural differences shape the way we speak, think and act. They mould our views of the world and how we interact with one another. With these clear differences in behaviour between cultures, can cultural differences also be seen at the brain level?
A key cultural difference established in research is that Western cultures tend to be more individualistic, meaning they focus more on the self as an individual, whereas Eastern cultures are more collectivistic, focusing more on the collective good and their part within a social context. This difference has been cited as a possible reason for differences in how Eastern and Western cultures view and process information such as visual scenes. For example, eye tracking studies have found that East Asian participants focus more on the relation between a focal object and its background by flicking their gaze between them, whereas Western participants focus more on the focal object. Differences have also been found in how faces are processed in these different cultures, with East Asians being more likely to focus on a central region of someone’s face, whilst Western participants were more likely to scan the face, with a specific focus on the eyes and mouth. But are these differences apparent within the structure and activity of the brain?
In a study conducted in 2006 which showed such cultural differences in brain function, Gutchess and colleagues measured brain activity in Americans and East Asians as they viewed pictures of an object alone, a focal object within a background, and a background with no obvious focal object. Whilst they did not find group differences in activity in context-processing regions, they found that American participants had greater activity in object-processing regions compared to East Asian participants. The finding that Western participants’ brains focused on processing individual objects more than those of East Asian participants is consistent with the individualistic-collectivistic hypothesis, as the hypothesis would predict that Americans focus more on the individual alone than East Asians do. This suggests there are some cultural differences in brain function, even in a process as fundamental as processing a basic scene.
Additionally, research has found that the brains of people from different cultures also respond differently in social contexts. For example, in research by Sui and colleagues in 2009, the difference in brain response when viewing pictures of one’s own face compared to a familiar person’s face was different in Chinese compared to British participants. Similarly, in 2007, Zhu and colleagues found that Western participants had greater activation in the medial prefrontal cortex – a region associated with self-representation – when making judgements about themselves compared to when making judgements about their mothers, whereas this difference in activation was smaller for Chinese participants. These findings suggest that Chinese participants differentiated much less than Western participants between themselves and their mother in this brain region, and that mothers were also represented (along with the self) in this self-representation region in Chinese, but not Western, participants. These findings are in line with the idea that Eastern cultures have a more collectivistic, interdependent attitude, and that such differences in cultural values are reflected in neural activity. Interestingly, research by Chiao and colleagues in 2009 even found that the strength of participants’ individualistic or collectivistic views modulated levels of activity in this self-representation region when thinking about themselves and others. Another study, by Sui and colleagues in 2013, which primed Chinese and British participants with views that were opposite to that of their culture (independent for Chinese participants, interdependent for British participants), found that this priming led to a weakened effect of the responses that would be expected for the cultures. This suggests that the values participants hold, which would usually be instilled in them by the culture in which they were raised, may be a causal factor in these differential brain responses.
As well as changing how our brains function, research has shown that our long-term experiences even lead to structural changes in our brains. Compared to functional differences, there has been much less research on potential anatomical differences in the brain across cultures. However, some research has pointed to structural differences between East Asian and Western participants in various brain regions. In 2018, Tang and colleagues found that some temporal cortical areas were larger in Han Chinese participants than in Caucasian participants, whereas some regions of the cortex in frontal and parietal areas were smaller in Han Chinese compared to Caucasian participants. Nevertheless, without further exploration, it is difficult to say what such structural differences mean, as having a brain region that is larger than another person’s does not on its own tell us what this means for behaviours that may be linked to that region. Unlike in functional studies, in which participants might complete a task testing a certain behaviour while their brain activity is recorded, we cannot link brain structure measures with a specific task or behaviour, or with proficiency in that task. Establishing the specific cause of any structural differences is also difficult because different cultural groups will differ on factors such as diet and properties of the language they speak, as well as cultural values, which may also impact structure.
While this field has produced some interesting findings regarding potential differences between cultures in the brain, many studies have focused on the same cultural groups for their comparisons, namely East Asians versus Westerners, making the findings very specific to differences between this narrow range of cultures. It would therefore be interesting to see whether such differences are also apparent between other cultural groups and whether any other differences are found.
So, when we go on holiday and explore different cultures, seeing the different customs and cuisines they have to offer, it is interesting to remember that these cultural differences are not just found at the behavioural, observable level, but also deep within the brain.
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