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Cultural neuroscience research examines how psychological processes are affected by the interplay between culture and biological factors, including genetic influences, patterns of neural activation, and physiological processes. In this review, we present foundational and current empirical research in this area, and we also discuss theories that aim to explain how various aspects of the social environment are interpreted as meaningful in different cultures and interact with a cascade of biological processes to ultimately influence thoughts and behaviors. This review highlights theoretical and methodological issues, potential solutions, and future implications for a field that aspires to integrate the complexities of human biology with the richness of culture.

The present research explores the role of positive emotion norms and positive illusions in explaining the higher subjective well-being observed among Europeans compared to East Asians in Canada. Specifically, we investigate the underlying psychological mechanisms contributing to the prevalence of positive self-views among individuals with European backgrounds, characterized by individualism, versus those with East Asian backgrounds, associated with collectivism. Our study compares Europeans and East Asians in Canada to determine whether cultural norms regarding positive emotions account for the elevated positive self-views and subjective well-being in Europeans. With a sample of 225 participants (112 Europeans and 113 East Asians), our findings reveal significant indirect effects of culture on subjective well-being through positive emotion norms and positive illusions. This study highlights that Europeans, compared to East Asians, believe it is more appropriate to experience and express positive emotions, and this norm influences their positive self-views, subsequently impacting subjective well-being. These findings offer valuable insights into how cultural factors shape subjective well-being across different groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a review of how cultural contexts shape and are shaped by psychological and neurobiological processes. We propose a framework that aims to culturally contextualize behavioral, genetic, neural, and physiological processes. Empirical evidence is presented to offer concrete examples of how neurobiological processes underlie social behaviors, and how these components are interconnected in larger cultural contexts. These findings provide some understanding of how the meanings shared by cultural experiences trigger a neurobiological, psychological, and behavioral chain of events, and how these events may be coordinated and maintained within a person. The review concludes with a reflection on the current state of cultural neuroscience and questions for the field to address.

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]

The present research explores the role of positive emotion norms and positive illusions in explaining the higher subjective well-being observed among Europeans compared to East Asians in Canada. Specifically, we investigate the underlying psychological mechanisms contributing to the prevalence of positive self-views among individuals with European backgrounds, characterized by individualism, versus those with East Asian backgrounds, associated with collectivism. Our study compares Europeans and East Asians in Canada to determine whether cultural norms regarding positive emotions account for the elevated positive self-views and subjective well-being in Europeans. With a sample of 225 participants (112 Europeans and 113 East Asians), our findings reveal significant indirect effects of culture on subjective well-being through positive emotion norms and positive illusions. This study highlights that Europeans, compared to East Asians, believe it is more appropriate to experience and express positive emotions, and this norm influences their positive self-views, subsequently impacting subjective well-being. These findings offer valuable insights into how cultural factors shape subjective well-being across different groups., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2024 Kim and Sasaki.)