Culture and priming in the perception of facial emotion, self-representation and thought: Brazil and United States

Abstract

Cultural approaches focused on the influences of individualist and collectivist norms describe the relationship between an individual and his or her social surroundings. The current study had a twofold purpose. The primary goal was to investigate whether Brazilians, like other collective peoples, displayed more group self-representations, categorized items more relationally and paid more attention to context than Americans. A secondary concern was to investigate if counter-cultural primes played a role in activating either collective or individual selves. Both American (n = 100) and Brazilian (n = 101) participants were assigned either to a no-prime condition or a counter-cultural prime condition and then were asked to rate emotion cartoons, categorize items, complete the Twenty Statement Test, and choose a representative object. As expected, unprimed Brazilian participants displayed more collectivist patterns on emotional and cognitive tasks than Americans. However, Brazilians offered more individualist self-representations than American participants. Priming only had a marginal effect on item categorization. These findings, along with the strengths and limitations of this study and suggestions for future research, are discussed.