Culture and social judgments: the importance of culture in Japanese and European Canadians’ N400 and LPC processing of face lineup emotion judgments

Research has shown that East Asians tend to be more influenced by background social information than North Americans. To further examine these findings, we collected event-related brain potentials (ERP) during a face lineup emotion rating task where participants were asked to rate the emotions of central persons of five person emotion lineups. Lineups were either congruent, with all faces showing similar emotions, or incongruent, with central face emotions differing from background face emotions. The behavioral results replicated previous findings, showing that Japanese ratings were more influenced by background information than European Canadians. The ERP data showed incongruity effects, showing increased processing of socially incongruent brainwaves (than congruent lineups) in early (the N400) and late (the LPC) meaning-based processing of stimuli. Differences in processing were not seen between the two conditions for European Canadians. Furthermore, independence social orientation beliefs explained these incongruity effects: (1) Independence social orientation beliefs moderated the two cultures’ early processing patterns, showing a negative relationship between independence and European Canadians’ N400 incongruity effects, while East Asians generally processed social incongruence early, and (2) independence social orientation beliefs were negatively related with both groups’ later processing of social incongruence. The importance of culture in social judgments is discussed.