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Are mechanisms for social attention influenced by culture? Evidence that social attention is triggered automatically by bottom-up gaze cues and is uninfluenced by top-down verbal instructions may suggest it operates in the same way everywhere. Yet considerations from evolutionary and cultural psychology suggest that specific aspects of one's cultural background may have consequence for the way mechanisms for social attention develop and operate. In more interdependent cultures, the scope of social attention may be broader, focusing on more individuals and relations between those individuals. We administered a multi-gaze cueing task requiring participants to fixate a foreground face flanked by background faces and measured shifts in attention using eye tracking. For European Americans, gaze cueing did not depend on the direction of background gaze cues, suggesting foreground gaze alone drives automatic attention shifting; for East Asians, cueing patterns differed depending on whether the foreground cue matched or mismatched background cues, suggesting foreground and background gaze information were integrated. These results demonstrate that cultural background influences the social attention system by shifting it into a narrow or broad mode of operation and, importantly, provides evidence challenging the assumption that mechanisms underlying automatic social attention are necessarily rigid and impenetrable to culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given the mounting empirical evidence to support both the cultural and biological shaping of emotional processes, there is a clear need to integrate these determinants of emotional processes. Much in the same vein as these efforts, in our research on gene-culture interactions, we have examined how cultural and biological factors jointly influence emotion regulation. The present paper specifically aims to present research considering both cultural and genetic factors as two interacting influences that shape emotion regulation. A series of studies conducted to test the gene-culture interaction involving OXTR rs53576 consistently show that individuals with the variant that is associated with socio-emotional sensitivity tend to utilize culturally normative forms of emotion regulation more than those without it. These findings underscore the importance of considering the interplay between socio-cultural and genetic factors that shape social behaviors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]