It is blatantly obvious that culture is a powerful predictor of variance in overt human behavior. The foods we eat and the manner in which they are prepared, the holidays that we celebrate, and the languages that we speak are all strongly influenced by our cultural background. Culturally influenced behaviors like these seem to arise from a combination of conscious choices and environmental exposure. As such, cross-cultural differences in human behavior may be fairly superficial, overlaid onto underlyingly similar cognitive and perceptual processes. Alternatively, it is possible that our cultural backgrounds impact our cognition and perception at a more fundamental level. In this chapter, we explore the possibility that culture impacts basic aspects of visual perception.

Prior research shows that after making a choice, decision makers shift their attitudes in a choice-congruous direction. Although this post-choice attitude change effect is robust, the neural mechanisms underlying it are poorly understood. Here, we tested the hypothesis that decision makers elaborate on their choice in reference to self-knowledge to justify the choice they have made. This self-referential processing of the choice is thought to play a pivotal role in the post-choice attitude change. Twenty-four young American adults made a series of choices. They also rated their attitudes toward the choice options before and after the choices. In support of the current hypothesis, we found that changes in functional connectivity between two putative self-regions (medial prefrontal cortex and posterior cingulate cortex/precuneus]) during the post-choice (vs. pre-choice) rating of the chosen options predicted the post-choice shift of the attitudes toward the chosen options. This finding is the first to suggest that cognitive integration of various self-relevant cognitions is instrumental in fostering post-choice attitude change. Hum Brain Mapp 37:3810-3820, 2016. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Cognitive dissonance theory proposes that difficult choice produces negatively arousing cognitive conflict (called dissonance), which motivates the chooser to justify her decision by increasing her preference for the chosen option while decreasing her preference for the rejected option. At present, however, neural mechanisms of dissonance are poorly understood. To address this gap of knowledge, we scanned 24 young Americans as they made 60 choices between pairs of popular music CDs. As predicted, choices between CDs that were close (vs. distant) in attractiveness (referred to as difficult vs. easy choices) resulted in activations of the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC), a brain region associated with cognitive conflict, and the left anterior insula (left aINS), a region often linked with aversive emotional arousal. Importantly, a separate analysis showed that choice-justifying attitude change was predicted by the in-choice signal intensity of the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC), a region that is linked to self-processing. The three regions identified (dACC, left aINS, and PCC) were correlated, within-subjects, across choices. The results were interpreted to support the hypothesis that cognitive dissonance plays a key role in producing attitudes that justify the choice.

The amygdala is critically involved in detecting emotionally salient stimuli and in enhancing memory for emotional information. Growing evidence also suggests that the amygdala plays a crucial role in addiction, perhaps by strengthening associations between emotionally-charged drug cues and drug-seeking behavior. In the current study, by integrating functional MRI (fMRI), genetics, and outcome data from a large group of smokers who completed a smoking-cessation intervention and attempted to quit, we show that the amygdala also plays a role in quitting. Specifically, we demonstrate that the amygdala response to smoking-cessation messages in smokers trying to quit is a predictor of their post-intervention quitting outcome. We further show that the amygdala response is modulated by genetic variation in the serotonin transporter and mediates the impact of this genetic variation on quitting. These results point to a gene–brain–behavior pathway relevant to smoking cessation, and add to our understanding of the role of the amygdala in nicotine addiction.

Tailored health interventions can be more effective in eliciting positive behavior change than generic interventions, but the underlying neural mechanisms are not yet understood. Here, 91 smokers participated in a functional magnetic resonance imaging session and a tailored smoking-cessation program. We found that increases in activation in self-related processing regions, particularly dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, to tailored messages predicted quitting during a 4-month follow-up.

An increasing number of smokers are obtaining information from the web to help them quit smoking. In this study, we examined how smokers process different types of messages similar to those from a web-based smoking cessation program: personalization/feedback ("Jane, you are a 23-year old female smoker"), motivational ("If you quit smoking, you could save $1200 a year"), and instructional ("When you feel angry, talk to someone instead of smoking") messages. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, smokers were exposed to the messages. On a later session, participants completed an online tailored smoking cessation program and started on a 10-week course of nicotine patch. Results show that participants indeed process the messages differently, activating brain regions associated with self-related processing (personalization/feedback), anticipated reward processing (motivational messages) and rules processing (instructional messages). This research is relevant for advancing web-based tailored interventions for substance use.

Compared to truthful answers, deceptive responses to queries are expected to take longer to initiate. Yet attempts to detect lies through reaction time (RT) have met with limited success. We describe a new procedure that seems to increase the RT difference between truth-telling and lies. It relies on a Stroop-like procedure in which responses to the labels true and false are sometimes reversed. The utility of this method is assessed in a laboratory study involving both statements of fact and attitude. Three different ethnic groups participated: Americans of European ancestry, East Asians, and native Arabic speakers. For all three groups, our technique allowed identification of prevarication reliably better than chance. ∗Contact: hchua@umich.edu.

Both affective neuroscience and decision science focus on the role of emotions in decisions. Regret and disappointment are emotions experienced with negative decision outcomes. The present research examines the neural substrates of regret and disappointment as well as the role of regret and disappointment in decision making. Experiment 1 compared the subjective experience of regret and disappointment. Participants selected one of two gambles and received different types of feedback during the outcome phase. Despite identical nominal losses, regret induced a more intense dislike of the outcomes and a stronger desire to switch choices than disappointment. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, Experiment 2 examined the neural correlates of regret and disappointment. Both regret and disappointment activated anterior insula and dorsomedial prefrontal cortex relative to fixation, with greater activation in regret than in disappointment. In contrast to disappointment, regret also showed enhanced activation in the lateral orbitofrontal cortex. These findings suggest that regret and disappointment, emotions experienced during decision-related loss, share a general neural network but differ in both the magnitude of subjective feelings and with regret activating some regions with greater intensity.

BACKGROUND:Smoking leads to illnesses including addiction, cancer, and cardiovascular and respiratory diseases. Different intervention programs have become available. In the past decade, providing tailored smoking cessation messages has been shown to be more effective in inducing smoking cessation than one-size-fits-all interventions. However, little is known about the brain responses of smokers when they receive tailored smoking cessation messages. METHODS:A neuroimaging study using blocked and event-related designs examined neural activity in 24 smokers exposed to high-tailored and low-tailored smoking cessation messages. RESULTS:In both blocked and event-related conditions, rostral medial prefrontal cortex and precuneus/posterior cingulate were engaged more during the processing of high-tailored smoking cessation messages than low-tailored smoking cessation messages. CONCLUSIONS:The activation patterns of smokers to tailored cessation messages show involvement of brain areas commonly implicated in self-related processing. Results seem to add support to the suggested role of self-relevance in tailored cessation programs, where previous studies have shown a potential mediating role of self-relevance on smoking abstinence. The findings are relevant to understanding the cognitive mechanisms underlying tailored message processing and might point to new directions for testing response to health communications programming.

Background: The present study investigates the possibility that culture affects age differences in context memory. There is evidence that East-Asians process scenes more holistically and show better context memory than Americans. Objective: We examined evidence for differences in binding source to context in young and old Americans and native Chinese. We hypothesized that age effects on source memory could be mitigated due to these cultural differences in processing style. Methods: During incidental encoding, younger and older Chinese and Americans watched a video with statements spoken by four distinct speakers. After a brief interval, participants identified source (experiment 1) or item and source (experiment 2). Results: We observed substantial age-related deficits in source memory in both cultures but little evidence for cultural differences in source or item memory. Conclusion: Basic source memory processes operate similarly across culture and age. The source of holistic processing differences observed between cultures may occur in cognitive operations that are more highly bound to a social context.

There have long been speculations that graphical and numerical presentations of risk statistics differ in their impact on people’s willingness to pursue actions that could harm or even kill them. But research has been unclear about the processes whereby the pictorial character of graphical displays per se might affect those risky decisions or even whether such effects actually occur. In two studies, we demonstrate that the pictorial nature of a graphical risk display can, indeed, increase risk avoidance. This increase is associated with a heightened impression of the riskiness of less safe alternatives. The results suggest that this picture-driven, intensified sense of riskiness, in turn, rests on two kinds of mechanisms: one cognitive, the other affective. Cognitively, pictorial presentations impose weaker upper bounds on people’s internal representations of the chances that riskier alternatives will bring about actual harm. Affectively, pictures ignite stronger, more aversive negative associations with riskier options and their outcomes.