Cultural Specificity in Amygdala Response to Fear Faces
Abstract
The human amygdala robustly activates to fear faces. Heightened response to fear faces is thought to reflect the amygdala's adaptive function as an early warning mechanism. Although culture shapes several facets of emotional and social experience, including how fear is perceived and expressed to others, very little is known about how culture influences neural responses to fear stimuli. Here we show that the bilateral amygdala response to fear faces is modulated by culture. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure amygdala response to fear and nonfear faces in two distinct cultures. Native Japanese in Japan and Caucasians in the United States showed greater amygdala activation to fear expressed by members of their own cultural group. This finding provides novel and surprising evidence of cultural tuning in an automatic neural response.
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Adams and colleagues showed that amygdala activation to a fear face depends on both gaze and group membership, responding especially strongly to an ingroup fear face of averted gaze and an outgroup fear face of direct gaze.
“Adams and colleagues (in press) showed that the amygdala activation to a fear face depends on both gaze and group membership of the stimulus face.In particular, the amygdala responds especially strongly to an ingroup fear face of averted gaze (indicative of a common threat in the direction of the gaze) and an outgroup fear face of direct gaze (indicative of a potential threat to the self) (see”
From Cultural neuroscience of the self: understanding the social grounding of the brain (2010) · cites this paper as Chiao et al., 2008
Cites
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“Building on this previous work, Tang and colleagues investigated patterns of brain activation linked to mental computation among European Americans and Chinese and found strong evidence for the involvement of linguistic processing areas in mental computation.”
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Culture, gaze and the neural processing of fear expressions
Adams, R. B., Franklin, R. G., Rule, N. O., Freeman, J. B., Kveraga, K., Hadjikhani, N., Yoshikawa, S., & Ambady, N. (2010) · Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience · doi:10.1093/scan/nsp047 · Cited by 47 · see citing works
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- Authors
- Chiao, J. Y., Iidaka, T., Gordon, H. L., Nogawa, J., Bar, M., Aminoff, E., Sadato, N., & Ambady, N.
- Affiliations
- Northwestern University (US)
- Nagoya University (JP)
- Tufts University (US)
- Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging (US)
- National Institute for Physiological Sciences (JP)
- Venue
- Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
- Publisher
- MIT Press - Journals
- Published
- 2008-12-01
- Volume
- 20
- Issue
- 12
- Pages
- 2167-2174
- ISSN
- 0898-929X (ISSN-L)
- 1530-8898
- OpenAlex
- W2133894304
- Cited by
- 306
- References
- 9
- Citations by year
- 2026: 3 · 2025: 11 · 2024: 7 · 2023: 5 · 2022: 15 · 2021: 30 · 2020: 7 · 2019: 10 · 2018: 12 · 2017: 14 · 2016: 33 · 2015: 20 · 2014: 24 · 2013: 22 · 2012: 18
- FWCI
- 12.79
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Funders
- National Science Foundation
- Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology
- Japan Society for the Promotion of Science
- National Institute of Mental Health (R01MH070833)
- National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NS050615, R01NS050615)
- National Institute for Physiological Sciences
- Topics
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Face Recognition and Perception
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Cultural Differences and Values
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Evolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior
- Keywords
- amygdala, fearful faces, cultural specificity, cross-cultural comparison, facial expression perception, intergroup threat
- MeSH terms
- Adolescent, Adult, Amygdala, Analysis of Variance, Cross-Cultural Comparison, Face, Fear, Female, Humans, Image Processing, Computer-Assisted, Functional Laterality, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Male, Oxygen, Pattern Recognition, Visual, Photic Stimulation, Reaction Time, Young Adult
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