Taken from the Canvas Discussion boards, posted here for posterity:

Hi everyone. I was a tad confused writing this little assignment because annotated bibliographies and literature reviews are two different things, and HOA4 seems to want us to conflate them. I am hoping that, as an early poster, I haven’t totally messed up!

Without further ado, I hope you find the following review of a paper related to cultural neuroscience interesting and enlightening 😀

– – – – –

Han, S., & Humphreys, G. (2016). Self-construal: A cultural framework for brain function. Current Opinion in Psychology, 8, 10-14.

The issue at the heart of this paper is cultural influence on brain activity, with a focus on individualistic versus collectivistic values. This relates specifically to how Western culture tends to encourage independent self-construal, emphasizing independence and uniqueness of self, while East Asian culture promotes interdependent self-construal, emphasizing harmony with others. The paper had two main findings related to self-construal, or how an individual perceives, comprehends, and interprets themselves.

1. Self-construals mediate group differences in brain activity between East Asians and Westerners.
2. Self-construals modulate brain activity engaged in sensorimotor and cognitive/affective processes.

For the first finding, researchers followed procedures such as “intervention through priming” where participants read essays containing interdependent “we” or “us” pronouns, or independent “I” or “me” pronouns. fMRI studies showed that priming Chinese participants with independent pronouns induced greater right frontal activity in response to their own face, compared to priming with interdependent pronouns. Similarly, priming Asian-Americans with individualistic vs. collectivistic values before reflecting on their own traits led to increased activation of brain regions relating to episodic memory. Other tests were performed which involve neuroscientific jargon exceeding my casual understanding, but essentially what these results tell us is there is a causal relationship between culture and brain activity, and we can modify a variety of brain activity by priming specific cultural values.

The second finding essentially involved researchers using EEGs on Chinese participants while delivering painful electric shocks after independent self-construal priming. They found that the increased self-focus caused by a “temporary shift in self-construal” which enhanced the pain experience. Other tests saw independent and interdependent priming affecting a wide range of other brain activities, which demonstrated a cause-effect relationship between specific cultural values and specific neurocognitive processes.

What this all means is that culture literally and measurably affects the way our brain functions. I feel the methodology employed was appropriate because it relied on well-established methods of brain imaging and sociocultural research.

I selected a paper based on cultural neuroscience because I noticed a glaring absence of neuroscientific research in our course readings. I wanted to open a door into discussing culture from this angle. I chose this paper in particular because it is relatively short, and its abstract showed that cultural influence extends beyond the behavioural and psychological effects explored in this course. I thought the article would be easily digested. I was wrong. It was dense, complicated, confusing, and frustrating to read. In this respect I totally understand why neuroscience readings are absent from the course, and I’m not sure I would even recommend this particular reading as a valuable future resource for ETEC565G.

However, I still think it’s important to consider exploring cultural neuroscience in some way within this course. A wealth of excellent research is available to support the claims that culture affects brain function, and spending time in earnest to understand these findings would help bridge the massive gap between neuroscientists and most educators.