Culture, gaze and the neural processing of fear expressions

Abstract

The direction of others' eye gaze has important influences on how we perceive their emotional expressions. Here, we examined differences in neural activation to direct- versus averted-gaze fear faces as a function of culture of the participant (Japanese versus US Caucasian), culture of the stimulus face (Japanese versus US Caucasian), and the relation between the two. We employed a previously validated paradigm to examine differences in neural activation in response to rapidly presented direct- versus averted-fear expressions, finding clear evidence for a culturally determined role of gaze in the processing of fear. Greater neural responsivity was apparent to averted- versus direct-gaze fear in several regions related to face and emotion processing, including bilateral amygdalae, when posed on same-culture faces, whereas greater response to direct- versus averted-gaze fear was apparent in these same regions when posed on other-culture faces. We also found preliminary evidence for intercultural variation including differential responses across participants to Japanese versus US Caucasian stimuli, and to a lesser degree differences in how Japanese and US Caucasian participants responded to these stimuli. These findings reveal a meaningful role of culture in the processing of eye gaze and emotion, and highlight their interactive influences in neural processing.

Fig. 1

(A) Top half of figure depicts global activations associated with main effects and interaction at P < 0.001, uncorrected, superimposed on the rendered brain from four perspectives, top, bottom, left, and right. (B) Bottom half of figure depicts activation surviving a threshold of P < 0.01, uncorrected within the anatomically specified region of left and right amygdalae, and graphical representations of the mean beta values associated with each treatment condition extracted from these clusters (top left and right) as well as from the mean of all voxels within the bilateral amygdalae (bottom center). The dependent variable was computed as a contrast between direct versus averted gaze perception, such that positive scores represent more activation to direct relative to averted fear, and vice versa for negative scores.