Cultural influences on neural systems of intergroup emotion perception: An fMRI study.

Cultural factors, such as cultural group membership, have been shown to affect neural bases of face and emotion perception. However, little is known about how cultural factors influence neural processing of emotional faces expressed by in-group and out-group members. In this study, we examined cultural influences on neural activation during the intergroup perception of negative emotional faces. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to compare neural activation during intergroup emotion processing across cultures in three participants groups; two monocultural groups (i.e. Caucasian-Americans and native Japanese) and a bicultural group (i.e. Japanese-Americans). During scanning, the participants completed an emotional match-to-sample task consisting of negative facial expressions of Japanese and Caucasians. Our results show cultural modulation of neural response in the bilateral amygdala as a function of in-group biases and collectivistic values. Additionally, bicultural Japanese-Americans showed enhanced neural responses in the ventral medial prefrontal and posterior cingulate cortices, which had been related to self-related processing, during the perception of negative facial expression of Japanese. Neural activation in the ventral and posterior cingulate cortices reflected individuals' collectivistic tendencies only in the Japanese-American group, possibly due to greater sensitivity to ingroup biases in bicultural individuals. Our results demonstrate the influence of culture on neural responses during the perception of intergroup emotion from faces.

Brain activity sensitive to visual congruency effects relates to divergent thinking.

The present study used functional magnetic resonance imagining (fMRI) to examine the role of focused attention in divergent thinking and real-life creativity. Participants completed a Navon task, on which the stimuli consisted of a large letter made up of the smaller version of the same (congruent), or a different (incongruent) letter. Participants were cued to identify a letter at either the local or at the global level. A smaller congruency effect - how much faster people responded on the congruent than on the incongruent trials - was an index of focused attention. Overall, larger behavioral congruency effect was accompanied with increased activation in the anterior superior temporal gyrus (aSTG), and with increased activation in the left precuneus. Individual differences in divergent thinking, however, were associated with smaller behavioral congruency effect, as well as with smaller right aSTG increase on the incongruent versus congruent targets, suggesting that people with better performance on the divergent thinking tests have more focused attention. Real-world creativity was not associated with the congruency effect, or with any of the regions implicated in the congruency effect. Implications and directions for future research are discussed.

NIH funding longevity by gender.

Women have achieved parity with men among biomedical science degree holders but remain underrepresented in academic positions. The National Institutes of Health (NIH)-the world's largest public funder of biomedical research-receives less than one-third of its new grant applications from women. Correspondingly, women compose less than one-third of NIH research grantees, even though they are as successful as men in obtaining first-time grants. Our study examined women's and men's NIH funding trajectories over time (n = 34,770), exploring whether women remain funded at the same rate as men after receiving their first major research grants. A survival analysis demonstrated a slightly lower funding longevity for women. We next examined gender differences in application, review, and funding outcomes. Women individually held fewer grants, submitted fewer applications, and were less successful in renewing grants-factors that could lead to gender differences in funding longevity. Finally, two adjusted survival models that account for initial investigator characteristics or subsequent application behavior showed no gender differences, suggesting that the small observed longevity differences are affected by both sets of factors. Overall, given men's and women's generally comparable funding longevities, the data contradict the common assumption that women experience accelerated attrition compared with men across all career stages. Women's likelihood of sustaining NIH funding may be better than commonly perceived. This suggests a need to explore women's underrepresentation among initial NIH grantees, as well as their lower rates of new and renewal application submissions.

Positive Emotion Regulation and Psychopathology: A Transdiagnostic Cultural Neuroscience Approach.

There is burgeoning interest in the study of positive emotion regulation and psychopathology. Given the significant public health costs and the tremendous variance in national prevalence rates associated with many disorders of positive emotion, it is critical to reach an understanding of how cultural factors, along with biological factors, mutually influence positive emotion regulation. Progress in this domain has been relatively unexplored, however, underscoring the need for an integrative review and empirical roadmap for investigating the cultural neuroscientific contributions to positive emotion disturbance for both affective and clinical science domains. The present paper thus provides a multidisciplinary, cultural neuroscience approach to better understand positive emotion regulation and psychopathology. We conclude with a future roadmap for researchers aimed at harnessing positive emotion and alleviating the burden of mental illness cross-culturally.

Psychological constructionism and cultural neuroscience.

Lindquist et al. argue that emotional categories do not map onto distinct regions within the brain, but rather, arise from basic psychological processes, including conceptualization, executive attention, and core affect. Here, we use examples from cultural neuroscience to argue that psychological constructionism, not locationism, captures the essential role of emotion in the social and cultural brain.