Date	2015-03-26
Time	16:00 - 17:00
E-mail	ednu@ied.edu.hk
Venue	HKIEd Tai Po Campus D2-LP-14

EDNU March Research Seminar III: Cultural differences in behavioral, psychophysiological, and neural correlates of emotional feelings - A study of admiration and compassion in Beijing and in Los Angeles   Date: 26 Mar 2015 (Thu) Time: 16:00 - 17:00 Venue: HKIEd Tai Po Campus D3-P-01 Speaker: Dr. Xiaofei Yang (Brain and Creativity Institute, University of Southern California)     Eastern cultures value calmness and emotion moderation, while Western cultures value excitement and emotion expressiveness. Although East-West differences in emotion related behavior have been consistently documented, it is unclear whether these differences extend to the psychophysiological and the neural level. Here, young adults (aged 18-30) in Beijing and in Los Angeles reported their feelings to compassion and admiration-inducing narratives first during an open-ended private emotion-induction interview and then again during a functional MRI session with simultaneous psychophysiological recording. As expected, Chinese participants were less expressive comparing to American participants, despite no group differences in reported feeling strength. Using an event-related approach, we also found that Chinese participant showed less cardiac arousal. Further, cultural groups differed in patterns of correlations between real-time fluctuations in reported feeling strength and activity in the anterior insula (AI), a cortical region important for conscious emotional experience. Feeling strength was more strongly correlated with ventral AI activity (the autonomic modulatory sector) in the Chinese group, and more strongly correlated with the dorsal AI activity (the visceral somatosensory sector) in the American group. Findings demonstrated that cultural differences in emotion processing extend beyond the observable behavior, and suggested that the neural process of constructing conscious emotional feelings is at least partly influenced by learned cultural values.  Preliminary findings from our ongoing longitudinal study with 1st to 2nd generation East-Asian adolescents (aged 14-17) in Los Angeles support our interpretation: the better youths’ reported emotional home lives, the more closely their data resembled the average pattern found among Chinese young adults, suggesting that bicultural East-Asian American youths may learn acculturated neural processing of feelings via high quality family relationships.