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Unattended Emotional Prosody Affects Visual Processing of Facial Expressions in Mandarin-Speaking Chinese: A Comparison With English-Speaking Canadians

Emotional cues from different modalities have to be integrated during communication, a process that can be shaped by an individual’s cultural background. We explored this issue in 25 Chinese participants by examining how listening to emotional prosody in Mandarin influenced participants’ gazes at em...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Liu, Pan, Rigoulot, Simon, Jiang, Xiaoming, Zhang, Shuyi, Pell, Marc D.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: SAGE Publications 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8053741/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33958813
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0022022121990897
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author Liu, Pan
Rigoulot, Simon
Jiang, Xiaoming
Zhang, Shuyi
Pell, Marc D.
author_facet Liu, Pan
Rigoulot, Simon
Jiang, Xiaoming
Zhang, Shuyi
Pell, Marc D.
author_sort Liu, Pan
collection PubMed
description Emotional cues from different modalities have to be integrated during communication, a process that can be shaped by an individual’s cultural background. We explored this issue in 25 Chinese participants by examining how listening to emotional prosody in Mandarin influenced participants’ gazes at emotional faces in a modified visual search task. We also conducted a cross-cultural comparison between data of this study and that of our previous work in English-speaking Canadians using analogous methodology. In both studies, eye movements were recorded as participants scanned an array of four faces portraying fear, anger, happy, and neutral expressions, while passively listening to a pseudo-utterance expressing one of the four emotions (Mandarin utterance in this study; English utterance in our previous study). The frequency and duration of fixations to each face were analyzed during 5 seconds after the onset of faces, both during the presence of the speech (early time window) and after the utterance ended (late time window). During the late window, Chinese participants looked more frequently and longer at faces conveying congruent emotions as the speech, consistent with findings from English-speaking Canadians. Cross-cultural comparison further showed that Chinese, but not Canadians, looked more frequently and longer at angry faces, which may signal potential conflicts and social threats. We hypothesize that the socio-cultural norms related to harmony maintenance in the Eastern culture promoted Chinese participants’ heightened sensitivity to, and deeper processing of, angry cues, highlighting culture-specific patterns in how individuals scan their social environment during emotion processing.
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spelling pubmed-80537412021-05-04 Unattended Emotional Prosody Affects Visual Processing of Facial Expressions in Mandarin-Speaking Chinese: A Comparison With English-Speaking Canadians Liu, Pan Rigoulot, Simon Jiang, Xiaoming Zhang, Shuyi Pell, Marc D. J Cross Cult Psychol Articles Emotional cues from different modalities have to be integrated during communication, a process that can be shaped by an individual’s cultural background. We explored this issue in 25 Chinese participants by examining how listening to emotional prosody in Mandarin influenced participants’ gazes at emotional faces in a modified visual search task. We also conducted a cross-cultural comparison between data of this study and that of our previous work in English-speaking Canadians using analogous methodology. In both studies, eye movements were recorded as participants scanned an array of four faces portraying fear, anger, happy, and neutral expressions, while passively listening to a pseudo-utterance expressing one of the four emotions (Mandarin utterance in this study; English utterance in our previous study). The frequency and duration of fixations to each face were analyzed during 5 seconds after the onset of faces, both during the presence of the speech (early time window) and after the utterance ended (late time window). During the late window, Chinese participants looked more frequently and longer at faces conveying congruent emotions as the speech, consistent with findings from English-speaking Canadians. Cross-cultural comparison further showed that Chinese, but not Canadians, looked more frequently and longer at angry faces, which may signal potential conflicts and social threats. We hypothesize that the socio-cultural norms related to harmony maintenance in the Eastern culture promoted Chinese participants’ heightened sensitivity to, and deeper processing of, angry cues, highlighting culture-specific patterns in how individuals scan their social environment during emotion processing. SAGE Publications 2021-02-15 2021-04 /pmc/articles/PMC8053741/ /pubmed/33958813 http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0022022121990897 Text en © The Author(s) 2021 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
spellingShingle Articles
Liu, Pan
Rigoulot, Simon
Jiang, Xiaoming
Zhang, Shuyi
Pell, Marc D.
Unattended Emotional Prosody Affects Visual Processing of Facial Expressions in Mandarin-Speaking Chinese: A Comparison With English-Speaking Canadians
title Unattended Emotional Prosody Affects Visual Processing of Facial Expressions in Mandarin-Speaking Chinese: A Comparison With English-Speaking Canadians
title_full Unattended Emotional Prosody Affects Visual Processing of Facial Expressions in Mandarin-Speaking Chinese: A Comparison With English-Speaking Canadians
title_fullStr Unattended Emotional Prosody Affects Visual Processing of Facial Expressions in Mandarin-Speaking Chinese: A Comparison With English-Speaking Canadians
title_full_unstemmed Unattended Emotional Prosody Affects Visual Processing of Facial Expressions in Mandarin-Speaking Chinese: A Comparison With English-Speaking Canadians
title_short Unattended Emotional Prosody Affects Visual Processing of Facial Expressions in Mandarin-Speaking Chinese: A Comparison With English-Speaking Canadians
title_sort unattended emotional prosody affects visual processing of facial expressions in mandarin-speaking chinese: a comparison with english-speaking canadians
topic Articles
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8053741/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33958813
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0022022121990897
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