Culture, Gaze and the Neural Processing of Fear Expressions Essay (Critical Writing)

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The work under review was written in 2009 and is titled “Culture, gaze and the neural processing of fear expressions”. The article is a report on an experiment of how cultural differences and gaze affect the neural processing of fear expressions. This essay is a critical analysis of the paper especially its assertion that there are differences in cultural neural processing of fear expressions. The validity of the assumptions that guided the research will be scrutinized as well.

The paper has a cross-cultural setting and this justifies the appeal to an earlier authoritative study that compared the cultural experience to the expression of basic emotions (Ekman & Friesen, 1971). This paper under review, however, does not proceed on the premise of universality of emotional expression but rather on the cultural specificity of decoding and experiencing emotion. This explains why the literature reviewed emphasized nuances in expressing and experiencing emotions (Marsh et al., 2003). It is noteworthy that there is little evidence showing the significant cultural difference in the expression of emotion and the paper only quotes one study (Matsumoto, 2001). This limited availability of related research is probably what justifies the researchers opting to study neural differences in the experience of emotion based on two earlier studies (Moriguchi et al., 2005; Chiao et al., 2008).

Research ought to be systematic, deliberate and justified either by theory or other earlier works. The justifiability element is lacking in some aspects of the paper under review especially when it comes to vindicating the sample and the variables. No cogent information is given as to why the researchers opted to compare US Caucasians and Japanese as opposed to any other ethnic/cultural groupings e.g. US Hispanics and Chinese. The same applies for the choice to have neural processing of fear as the dependent variable; there are other basic universal emotions like anger, surprise, disgust, happy and sad (Ekman and Friesen, 1971) thus the research should have justified the use of fear and not the other universal emotions. The oversights noted above are especially conspicuous considering that the use of the procedure (Hadjikhani et al., 2008) and the stimuli (Ekman and Freisen, 1971) are both aptly supported.

One of the findings of the research appears to be unwarrantedly extrapolated i.e. both Japanese and US Caucasians show more neural activation to incongruous gaze based on what is regarded culturally appropriate. Based on this finding the researchers deduce that culturally specific norms of emotional expression are consistently conveyed and uniformly processed therefore similarly experienced across cultures. This deduction seems to imply that the people sampled were culturally competent and conversant with the norms of emotional expression that are prevalent in both cultures. It is wrong to assume that the sampled US Caucasians were knowledgeable of the Japanese cultural appropriateness of a gaze or that the Japanese sample was familiar with the cultural meaning of a gaze to a US Caucasian. The lack of any reasonable evidence that the sample was culturally competent means the interpretation of this finding is flawed as it is based on a fallacious assumption.

In conclusion, one finds the research illuminating in an area that has little corroborating information. It is based on the right premises and the methodology as well as the statistical analysis of data is relevant to the hypotheses but the interpretation of these results is questionable because the assumptions of the research are not explicit. Good research is falsifiable and rigorous and this research report falls short on both instances as it omits some key information that qualifies or would otherwise guide further research to refute the findings. The research paper has some glaring flaws but it is still significant in an emerging field of knowledge and should be used as a foundation to guide further research in this field.

References

Chiao, J. Y., Iidaka, T., & Gordon, H. L., (2008). Cultural Specificity in Amygdala Response to Fear Faces. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 20, 2167-74.

Ekman, P., & Friesen, W. V. (1971) Constants across Cultures in the Face and Emotion. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 17, 124-9.

Hadjikhani, N., Hoge, R., Snyder, J., & de Gelder, B. (2008) Pointing with the Eyes: The Role of Gaze in Communicating Danger. Brain and Cognition, 68, 1-8.

Marsh, A. A., Elfenbein, H. A., Ambady, N. (2003). Nonverbal “Accents”: Cultural Differences in Facial Expressions of Emotion. Psychological Science, 4, 373-6.

Matsumoto, D. (2001). Handbook of Culture and Psychology. New York: Oxford University Press.

Moriguchi, Y., Ohnishi, T., & Kawachi, T. (2005). Specific Brain Activation in Japanese and Caucasian People to Fearful Faces. NeuroReport, 16, 133-6.

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