Research Hit: Emotional Processing in Brain is Culturally Dependent

How functional connectivity to emotions can be different in different cultures

I thought we all had basic emotions and facial expressions which all human beings, of all cultures, have hard-wired?

Yes, that is a popular theory. And there is evidence that this is indeed true but this is more nuanced than we might expect. The question is always: just how much is culturally learnt?

I can’t imagine that simple basic emotions such as happiness, anger, or disgust are fundamentally different between cultures!

Well, that is precisely what Joseph Leshin et al. investigated including brain scans to investigate functional connectivity when processing facial expressions of others.

For this they investigated the difference between one group that had grown up in China but were now living in the USA and white Americans who had grown up in the USA. For ease of analysis they only analysed two emotions: anger, and disgust.

Ok, and what were the results?