Switching between Mii and Wii: The effects of cultural priming on the social affective N400

The effect of priming cultural schemas on the neural mechanisms underlying attention is not well understood. Individuals in multicultural environments often switch between cultural schemas according to the immediate sociocultural context (Hong et al. in Am Psychol, 55:709–720, 2000 ). Across behavioral and neural measures, individuals from collectivist cultures (e.g., East Asians) have been shown to allocate greater attention to background objects and are more sensitive to social context relative to individuals from individualist cultures (e.g., European Americans). We sought to examine whether or not priming of independent and interdependent self-construal affects neural activity underlying attention to social contexts in bicultural (i.e., East Asian Americans) and monocultural (i.e., European Americans) individuals. Using a modified N400 event-related potential design, we measured the degree to which East Asian American participants and European American participants, responded to affective incongruity in the emotional expression of a central figure relative to the surrounding figures. As predicted, when East Asian American bicultural participants were primed with interdependent values they displayed greater N400s to incongruent affective stimuli than congruent affective stimuli. In contrast, when primed with independent values, bicultural participants did not display a greater N400 to incongruent stimuli. European American participants did not display a greater N400 under either priming condition. Implications for the N400, biculturalism, and dynamic culture are discussed.