Publications

Previous research has shown that Latin Americans tend to value positive emotion and favorable self-evaluation. However, it has remained unclear whether this positivity extends to a robust self-enhancement bias. In a series of studies across four Latin American countries—Chile, Mexico, Ecuador, and Colombia—we found clear evidence of such a bias. Crucially, this self-enhancement was associated not with independence (as is typically assumed in Western contexts), but with interdependence. In this respect, Latin American self-enhancement resembles patterns observed in the Middle East, diverging from the North American model despite surface similarities.

This is the first comprehensive demonstration of self-enhancement in Latin America based on multiple validated measures. Even more importantly, it challenges the long-standing Western assumption that self-enhancement is a byproduct of striving for independence. By revealing its interdependent roots in Latin American contexts, our findings suggest that self-positivity can serve communal or relational functions, not just individualistic ones. This opens a new research agenda on interdependent selfhood in Latin America and its implications for motivation, emotion, and identity.

Although cultural psychology has consistently shown that East Asians self-enhance less than European Americans, some skeptics continue to argue that East Asians may simply hide their self-positivity. According to this view, they are being modest or strategic, concealing what many (especially American) psychologists consider a universal “human instinct.” This paper draws on recent neuroscience research to challenge that skepticism, showing that the absence of self-enhancement among East Asians is not merely a matter of social presentation, but reflects culturally shaped motivational processes at the neural level.

Psychology as a discipline has long harbored a cultural bias—often assuming that traits like self-enhancement are inherently human. This assumption, historically echoed by figures like William James, continues to shape mainstream thinking. By integrating neuroscientific evidence, this paper not only challenges that bias but also opens a new window into how cultural participation shapes the neural basis of motivation. It offers a compelling demonstration of how culture penetrates even the most basic psychological mechanisms, including those related to self-evaluation.

This paper focuses on uric acid. If you’re wondering why someone studying culture should care about a chemical compound best known for its association with gout, hypertension, and similar conditions, you’re not alone. Our paper makes a somewhat heretical claim: that uric acid and humans co-evolved due to its role as a potent antioxidant, which was essential for sustaining the high energy consumption required for increasingly complex cognitive functioning in the evolution of Homo sapiens—the cultural animal. Our data show that culturally endorsed traits related to interdependence longitudinally predict an increase in the concentration of uric acid in the bloodstream among Japanese adults.

There are many conjectures about how human culture evolved. Ever since humans diverged from a common primate ancestor in Africa more than 6 million years ago, one major challenge has been to establish the metabolic basis for sustaining high-energy consumption while protecting biological systems—particularly the central nervous system (i.e., the brain)—from oxidative damage. The idea proposed here may help clarify one piece of this vast puzzle: how a single primate species evolved into what it is today—an animal with extraordinarily high cognitive power, capable of constructing the massive biological niche we call culture.

Using Schwartz value indices, we found that Protestants score higher than Catholics on egalitarian (or “transcendence”) and self-direction values across multiple European countries. Interestingly, Protestants also place greater value on conformity and less on hedonism compared to Catholics. This last evidence may seem surprising given Protestantism’s strong emphasis on individualism, which is often associated with lower conformity and greater openness to hedonism. However, our findings suggest that Protestant traditions may foster a distinct moral structure—one that binds individualism with ascetic discipline, discouraging indulgence while enforcing strict normative rules.

Although our data come from European nations, these findings may offer insights into the moral foundations shaping contemporary Christian movements, including those fueling right-wing populist upheavals. The emphasis on conformity and moral discipline within Protestant traditions could help explain why certain Protestant groups gravitate toward movements that stress strict social order and moral conservatism, such as Fundamentalist Christianity in the U.S. and Trumpism. At the same time, these values have historically also played a role in progressive reform movements. Thus, how the normative push inherent in Protestantism manifests may depend on broader social and historical contexts. You might argue that Protestantism allows for a wider pendulum swing, fostering both strict moral conservatism and progressive reform, depending on the era and circumstances.

We compared the US and Japan to investigate how people from different cultures respond when personal loyalty conflicts with societal rules. We show that Japanese have a harder time resolving moral dilemmas about close others than Americans, but ultimately choose to consistently prioritize societal over personal or interpersonal interests, whereas Americans choose to consistently prioritize personal interests.

It provides some of the first insights into how individuals’ moral reasoning about close relationships varies across cultures, and contributes specifically to our understanding of the moral priorities in Japanese culture.

We used a validated measure of emotional acculturation to investigate how immigrants adapt to the emotional norms of their host culture. The study found that individuals from more individualistic cultures tend to adopt these norms more easily.

In today’s increasingly multicultural world, where people frequently cross cultural boundaries, understanding how individuals adjust emotionally to new cultures is essential for navigating and facilitating smoother cultural integration.

This paper offers a comprehensive review of the state of cultural psychology. It covered (i) major constructs guiding the field, (ii) cultural evolution, and (iii) varieties of interdependence across the globe.

The field of cultural psychology is poised to expand to the future. This paper distills the major accomplishments of the past and identify the directions for the future.

This is a commentary on a target article by Grossmann in Behavioral and Brain Sciences. It bolsters the basic insight that negative emotions are sometimes adaptive and adds a cultural consideration.

Our work shows the central significance of cultural considerations in understanding the basic biological functions of emotion.

Subjective social status is widely believed to be associated with better health. This paper shows the first evidence that this belief does not travel well beyond Western culture.

Subjective social status has various culture-specific meanings that have yet to be fully uncovered and spelled out. Our paper is an effort to address this knowledge gap.

Neuroticism is believed to have an adverse effect on health. Here, we show that this possibility, as applied to brain health, is significantly moderated by “behavioral adjustment,” one’s ability and motivation to adjust their behaviors to situational contingencies.

This work contributes to the emerging literature on personality neuroscience by showing that a socio-cultural variable significantly moderates the impact of personality on the brain.

This paper illustrates the culture-dependency of positive illusions. It discusses why these illusions are not human universals. Instead, they are adaptations to Western culture emphasizing the self’s independence and positivity.

The paper shows how the assumed universality of positive illusions may tacitly promote ethnocentrism and how the cultural work discussed here could potentially begin addressing this potential misfall of the current literature.

Non-Western collectivist societies are typically tight in social norms. However, the norms at issue pertain primarily to external behaviors. How about feeling norms, the norms about what emotions to feel and how much? We expected and found that the feeling norms are stronger in individualistic societies.

This work expands the scope of norm psychology. Further, it shows how individualist societies regulate and even control each individual’s inner states that are assumed to be independent and immune to social influences.

The last three decades of cultural psychology research expanded the scope of psychology from exclusively Euro-centric to include East Asian perspectives. However, much has yet to be learned about the Rest. In this paper, we present a theoretical framework for this endeavor. We cover four non-Western regions, i.e., East Asia, South Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. They show distinct varieties of interdependence. We then analyze how some of these traditions, shaped over the last several thousand years, influenced the emergence of the Modern West, which has formed the basis of contemporary Western culture.

Our work may be a stepping stone toward globalizing psychology and refining psychological theories that fully apply to even those outside the West.

This paper is a commentary on Uchiyama & Muthkrishna’s target article entitled, “Cultural evolution of genetic heritability.” Uchiyama and Muthkrishna offer an important cautionary note on the interpretation of the heritability index. However, it does not directly address how culture and genes might interact. Here, we suggest that one allele of the dopamine D4 receptor gene promotes the acquisition of cultural values and practices and likely has co-evolved with the human culture over the last 50,000 years.

Uchiyama and Muthkrishna’s analysis stops short of directly addressing the dynamic interaction between culture and genes. We have offered the hypothesis that even though cultural traits are entirely contingent on ecological (i.e., environmental) factors, genetic factors may still modulate cultural acquisition. These genetic factors likely helped the human species acquire and sustain cultural traditions over the last 50,000 years. By pushing this type of analysis forward, we may better understand how genes and culture have co-evolved to produce contemporary cultural and individual variations.

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has taken a massive toll on human life worldwide. The case of the United States—the world’s largest economy—is particularly noteworthy since the country suffered a disproportionately larger number of deaths than all other countries during the first year of the pandemic. Here, we used a cultural psychology perspective, which offers unique insights into the vulnerability of this country. The emphasis is on mutually reinforcing interactions across collective, cultural, and psychological levels of analysis. We review extant evidence and argue that various factors at these disparate levels converged to foster an independent mode of action, which, in turn, undermined effective coping with the infectious disease. Several policy recommendations are offered.

The 21st century will most likely be the century of infectious diseases due to population expansion (which reduces the distance between humans and viruses of wild animal origin) and globalization (which makes the global spread of infectious viruses far more likely). As social and cultural psychological processes powerfully mediate the spread of a virus, building a deeper understanding of them is of utmost significance. This theoretical understanding is indispensable to make society better prepared for epidemics and pandemics in the future. Moreover, it is already clear that the effort to understand various social, behavioral, and psychological aspects of the current pandemic has significantly expanded the scientific knowledge of the social, behavioral, and psychological sciences. This crosstalk between theory-building and practical problem solving will enrich our science –and our policies– in the future to come.

This essay is a personal reflection of the field of culture in psychology. This reflection would hopefully contribute to a fuller understanding of how the field of social psychology has evolved. It is one of 50+ similar reflections and retrospectives on various topics. In my reflection, I start with a brief memoir of where I came from and why and how I became fascinated with the study of culture. I then illustrate, in a broad stroke, what we have accomplished. I also explain why I took on the questions of the brain in this connection more recently. Throughout, the theme is the dialectic between the effort to see many different effects with various methods and the single-mindedness in how we might understand the relationship between culture and the agency.

The study of culture in social psychology as we know it today has been a development in the last few decades. This essay addresses how this effort has helped expand the scope of social psychology by incorporating culture and diversity into the field’s theoretical framework.

Self-enhancement, the tendency to view the self positively is widespread and robust in Western cultural contexts. However, this tendency is much weaker and sometimes reversed among East Asians. While the idea that cultural variation in self-enhancement exists is longstanding, the underlying mechanisms for self-enhancement or the associated cultural variation are unknown. Here, we propose the self-referential processing hypothesis of self-enhancement. Specifically, we suggest that self-enhancement involves spontaneously linking a positive outcome to the self. Using an EEG marker of internal (vs. external) attention, upper alpha, we show that European Americans show greater internal attention when they imagine a success (vs. failure) occurring to the self. The comparable effect was not observed among Taiwanese. Further, we show that the cultural difference in internal attention in response to successes (vs. failures) predicts their self-reported levels of self-enhancement. These findings suggest that people who self-enhance spontaneously recruit internal attention during self-referential processing for favorable events that occur to them.

Self-enhancement is one of the most widely studied phenomenon in social psychology. Many theories have been proposed, including a primarily motivational or cognitive accounts. Here, we integrate these two accounts and suggest that self-enhancement spontaneously recruits self-referential processing in response to ones’ successes (vs. failures). We show evidence for this mechanism among European Americans. Consistent with prior work that East Asians do not self-enhance, we failed to find a comparable effect among Taiwanese. The cultural difference in self-referential processing explained why European Americans showed self-enhancement (perceived they were impacted more by a success than failure) and Taiwanese did not.

A primary foundation of cross-cultural research is that differences in values and beliefs across cultures affect how individuals within those cultures think and behave. A common way to quantify these differences between East Asian and European American cultures is by assessing self-construal, or the salience of one’s own personal beliefs and desires (independent self-construal). Here, we measured independent self-construal and also collected electroencephalogram (EEG) alpha power at rest, a correlate of default mode network (DMN) activity and self-referential processing. We found a positive correlation between these measures when the eyes were closed and combining across four independent samples, indicating that resting-state alpha power is correlated with the salience of the personal self at rest.

This study provides important evidence for a foundational claim of cross-cultural psychology, that the salience of the self varies systematically for those who endorse values consistent with East Asian or European American cultures. Even when no task is being performed, self-construal is associated with these systematic differences in neural activity. This offers important insights into how culture affects neuroplasticity.

Holistic cognitive style entails allocating greater attention to contextual scenes surrounding focal objects. Building on prior work showing that East Asians tend to be more holistic than European Americans, we find that East Asians have greater gray matter (GM) volume in brain regions uniquely involved in the processing of contextual scenes compared to European Americans. Moreover, the GM volume in one of the scene-processing regions, the parahippocampal place area, is associated with the construal of the self as interdependent (vs. independent).

Our study provides the first evidence of a structural neural correlate of cultural variation in cognitive style. Importantly, we show that self-construal is implicated in the origin of this variation. Together, our study reinforces the idea that culture is “embrained”.

Systemic racism is an important reason for the disproportionately high COVID-19 fatality among American Blacks and Hispanics. But it is not clear exactly which aspects of systemic racism might be responsible for it. Here, we filled this gap by showing that racial residential segregation plays a major role. Specifically, we found that metropolitan areas that segregate Blacks and Hispanics had a faster growth of COVID-19 cases and deaths. Moreover, the income inequality of the area exacerbated the malignant effect of residential segregation.

Systemic racism has been made bare in recent incidences that motivated the Black Lives Matter movement. However, social scientists have yet to pin down exactly what is systemic about systemic racism. Our work shows that the history of residential segregation is a major culprit in the context of the current pandemic. It thus contributes to a better understanding of social structural forces as a significant determinant of the spread of infectious diseases such as COVID-19.

Prior work suggests that in the presence of threat people become more attune to norms. However, not all people may respond in the same way. Recent evidence shows that interdependent people may feel less alarmed by a threat because of the sense of social connection relationships provide. Consistent with this theorizing, we found that after being primed with a threat (vs. control), people showed enhanced vigilance and detection of norm violations. Importantly, this effect was attenuated for people high in interdependent self-construal.

Our work shows that interdependent self-construal impacts how people cope with external threats. As such, this may offer unique implications for the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic in 2020. Major outbreaks are being reported after large social gatherings. The sense of interdependence that may be enhanced in these groups could have fostered a sense of complacency if people become looser in norm enforcement. The public health implications of the current study may deserve a careful assessment in the future.

Our earlier work found that Japanese show remarkably better health profiles compared to Americans, including lower levels of inflammation. Here, we explored several lifestyle variables that might be associated with lower levels of both interleukin-6 and C-reactive protein and found a significant effect for both Japanese style diet and regular practice of relaxing bathing.

The finding illustrates how everyday cultural practices related to eating and bathing can serve as a powerful influence on biological health. It is also consistent with the earlier evidence that cardiovascular risks increase for Asian Americans by their U.S. generation status.

Here we followed our earlier work (Na et al., 2010, PNAS) and showed that cultural syndromes of both social orientation (i.e., independent vs. interdependent) and cognitive style (i.e., analytic vs. holistic) are coherent at the collective level, but not at the individual level. The observation suggests that people selectively use cultural resources, particularly cultural tasks, to weave their identity in an idiographic fashion. These individualized profiles do have stability over time, the study finds. Methodologically, the study calls for novel ways to access measurement equivalence.

The findings address the important question of what coherence is at the levels of both culture and person. The two levels of coherence are distinct. The coherence at the cultural level goes like this, “individualists are non-holistic.” However, at the individual level, you may or may not be non-holistic just because you are an individualist. Each person has an ideographic pattern of both social orientation and cognitive style, which provides the basis for the personal level coherence.

The current COVID-19 pandemic has impacted all countries across the globe, yet some countries have been affected more than some others. We find that relational mobility (RM) is one important factor that explains this cross-country variation. RM is the community’s tendency to engage with strangers and freely choose friends. Compared to their low RM counterparts, we find that countries high in RM compared have steeper growth rates of COVID-19 confirmed cases and deaths.

Our findings suggest that COVID-19 may spread faster in societies that facilitate broader social contact with others than those that don’t. This research underscores the need for social distancing to “flatten the curve,” especially in countries that value social openness (such as the U.S., Spain, Brazil, Mexico, and Canada). Notably, had the US been lower in relational mobility – as low as Japan, the COVID-related deaths would have been 8% (281) of the actual number reported at the end of the 30-day study period (3417).

Prior evidence shows that specific allelic variants of the dopamine D4 receptor gene (DRD4) sensitize carriers of these variants to cultural values and practices. We have argued that this happens because the carriers are more sensitive to cultural reward contingencies. Here, we provided the first evidence for this hypothesis. Compared to non-carriers, carriers were more sensitive to reward signals in a gambling task.

Ours is the first evidence for a putative mechanism for the DRD4 x culture interaction effect in the endorsement of cultural values and the volume of specific cortical regions that supposedly support culturally sanctioned behaviors. This empirical effort is an important step forward!

Is conscientiousness (a personality trait composed of diligence, dutifulness, and organization) healthy? According to the current literature of personality and health, the answer to this question is a resounding yes. Our paper calls into question this accepted wisdom. We used large cross-cultural surveys and showed that conscientiousness predicts better biological health among Americans. Moreover, healthy lifestyle mediates this relationship. All this is to show the existent evidence is robust and replicable. However, among Japanese, there was no direct association between conscientiousness and biological health. Moreover, conscientiousness predicted a tendency to carry out social obligations faithfully. This latter tendency, in turn, predicted impaired biological health. What this means is that conscientious Japanese work so hard because of the sense of social duty that they become less healthy.

This work is yet another demonstration that what appears to be a pan-cultural relationship between personality and health is contingent on socio-cultural context. A personality trait that is salubrious in one context may not be in another.

In this paper, we test whether countries that mandate BCG vaccination show flattened growth curves in COVID-19 infections and deaths, compared to those that do not. We find that countries that still maintain mandated BCG policies (e.g., China, Finland, and France) show significantly flatter growth curves, compared to those that had one only during the 20th century (e.g., Australia, Ecuador, and Spain) or those that never had one (e.g., Italy, Lebanon, and the U.S.).

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to have devastating consequences around the globe, without a current solution. We provide evidence suggesting that BCG vaccination can be effective in “flattening the curve.” Notably, our model predicts that if the United States mandated BCG vaccination, it would have only suffered 19% of its actual death toll by the end of March.

The temporoparietal junction (TPJ) is a region of the brain that is involved uniquely in perspective-taking. The finding that the TPJ is greater in volume for Asians than for European Americans suggests that there is a structural brain basis for a known cultural variation in the propensity toward perspective-taking, which is higher for Asians than for European Americans. The origin of the cultural variation may lie in cultural learning, as suggested by the moderation of the cultural difference by the DRD4 gene.

To participate in Asian cultural conventions requires perspective-taking and thus entails active recruitment of TPJ. Thus, our finding contributes to the growing evidence that culture is inscribed into the brain through reinforcement-based learning.

This paper outlines a theoretical model for understanding how culture shapes the psychological experience of aging. We propose that Western cultural contexts uphold a “youthful” ideal of active, positive independence. In late adulthood, as physical and cognitive capacities decline, this ideal becomes less attainable, creating a cultural mismatch that is potentially alienating. On the other hand, Asian cultural contexts prioritize adjusting to age-graded social roles, which may be more attainable throughout the lifespan. We review evidence in support of this theoretical model of culture and aging.

As the global population ages, it becomes increasingly important to understand the psychological experiences of older age. In particular, our work highlights a critical need to acknowledge the role of culture in shaping the trajectory of life-span adult development.

The paper addresses the factors that influence the spontaneous detection of norm violations. We showed that a neural marker of norm violation detection (N400) increases when those who believe their societal norms to be tight (vs. loose) are induced to be relationally oriented. Importantly, we induced relational tendencies with a previously validated subliminal priming procedure. The joint effect of relational orientation and perceptions of tightness vs. looseness of cultural norms illuminates how the reaction to norm violations is automatic and dynamically modulated. Our findings offer implications for the conditions in which norm-violating behaviors are monitored and the pertinent cultural norms enforced. It also sheds light on potential mechanisms for known cultural variations in the sensitivity toward norm violations.

Tightness and Interdependence are seen as two orthogonal, but related cultural dimensions. We demonstrated that inducing relational orientation (a proxy of interdependence) increased sensitivity to norms. Importantly, this only occurred for individuals who perceive their social context to be tight. This shows how both tightness and interdependence dynamically interact to increase sensitivity to norms.

In this paper, we show that the late positive potential (LPP), an electrocortical marker of emotional arousal in response to arousing stimuli, is modulated by one’s facial expressions. In particular, a frowning expression increases LPP in response to negative stimuli, but decreases LPP in response to positive stimuli. Smiling expression produces an opposite, albeit weaker effect. Behavioral ratings yield consistent results, such that stimuli were rated less pleasant when frowning compared to when smiling.

The facial feedback hypothesis states that facial actions can causally influence emotional experience. Although researchers have theorized that the effect of facial actions is direct (through certain neurophysiological pathways) and is not mediated by cognitive processes, there has been no solid evidence supporting it. By using a direct and well-validated electrophysiological signature of emotional arousal, our study thus provides the first evidence that facial actions may directly modulate cortical and subcortical emotional processing.

Previous work found negligible correlations among the tasks measuring social orientation and cognitive style in spite of reliable cultural differences in the same tasks. Although the finding may suggest that individuals differences in social orientation and cognitive style are noisy and random, our work shows that one’s profile across these tasks are stable.

The present findings suggest that both social orientation and cognitive style are a construct consisting of loosely-related and yet, cross-temporally stable subdomains. This kind of conceptualization could explain both reliable cultural differences at the group level and negligible correlations at the individual level. Moreover, it highlights the fact that within-person variability among different tasks can be an integral aspect of one’s cultural orientation.

Previous work (Murata et al. 2013) showed that people of East Asian descent demonstrated a greater ability to suppress their emotional arousal to an unpleasant stimulus than people of European-American descent. However, the exact individual difference across cultures that drove this effect remained unclear. Here, we measured independent vs. interdependent self-construal and found that this moderated the ability to suppress emotions (as measured by the LPP) in East Asians but not European-Americans.

This is the first demonstration that interdependent self-construal is critical for the efficacy of suppression as an emotional regulation technique for East Asians, but not for European-Americans. Only East Asians high in interdependence were able to suppress their emotional arousal, while no effect of interdependence was observed for European-Americans. This suggests that a congruence between culture, self-construal, and emotion regulation technique may be necessary for effective emotion regulation.

It is widely assumed that recurrent daily experiences of negative affect are unhealthy. In this paper, we provide evidence that challenges the generalizability of this assumption by demonstrating that culture moderates the relationship between negative affect and biological stress responses, with a focus on the HPA-axis activity. For Americans, negative affect was associated with a flattening of the diurnal cortisol slope. In contrast, this relationship was negligible among Japanese.

It has been theorized that negative affect may have culturally divergent health effects depending on whether it is interpreted as a failure of self-control, and thus poses a threat to the self, or is generally accepted as a natural aspect of life, and thus does not pose a self-threat. Our work is the first to elucidate this proposed mechanism by demonstrating that negative affect is differentially associated with diurnal cortisol profiles, the biological stress responses known to react to self-threat.

In this commentary, we first pointed out that U.S.-Japan comparison that was not examined in ML2 had been the singular focus of the original study by Miyamoto and Kitayama (2002). We then confirmed that the original finding does successfully replicate in ML2, with CB greater in magnitude in the U.S. than in Japan. We further showed that cross-cultural variability in the magnitude of CB can be predicted by various factors, such as perceived persuasiveness of essays, which suggests the need to take these factors into consideration when comparing the magnitude of CB across cultures. We end with a plea for systematic cross-cultural research in social psychology that is based on due respect for diversity on many human dimensions.

At the age of globalization, it is increasingly important to recognize that countries that vary in history, cultural heritage, geopolitical economy, and the like could show corresponding diversity in various psychological effects. Hence, we may be advised to start with a cardinal assumption that countries that are excluded from the mainstream psychology (referred to as “less WEIRD samples” in ML2) could be diverse on a variety of dimensions including ones that are fundamentally psychological.

Integrating historical and anthropological sources with an emerging socio-ecological perspective, we argue that Arabs show a self-assertive form of interdependence, which involves both a strong commitment to in-groups and strong self-assertion for the sake of protecting the in-group.

Arabs represent a pan-ethnic, cultural group of 400M people in 22 countries, spanning from North Africa to Western Asia. Despite their numerous contributions to arts and science, and their key role in global business and politics, Arabs are relatively neglected in extant social and cultural psychological literature. The few empirical studies that exist are limited to explicit self-reports, which are subject to response biases, lack predictive validity, etc. Therefore, virtually nothing is known about how Arab people may be characterized by more implicit psychological tendencies and compare with (independent) Westerners and (interdependent) East Asians. This is an important step in the study of different varieties of interdependence around the globe.

In this paper, we show that the gray matter (GM) volume of a few prefrontal regions, including the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), is greater among European Americans than among East Asian-born Asians. Importantly, this cultural difference is more pronounced among carriers of the 7- or 2-repeat allele of the DRD4 gene, a genetic variant that is known to heighten individual’s sensitivity to cultural influences. We also present preliminary evidence that as a function of time the East Asians have stayed in the U.S., their brain becomes “Americanized” (i.e., increased OFC GM volume), but only if they are the carriers.

It has been long theorized that culture and brain constitute each other. Our paper, however, presents the first evidence that culture can shape the morphometric property of the human brain. This study opens up a new direction of research to look at how culture may “go deep under the skin” to influence the structural and functional organization of the brain.

In this paper, we show that the gray matter (GM) volume of a few prefrontal regions, including the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), is greater among European Americans than among East Asian-born Asians. Importantly, this cultural difference is more pronounced among carriers of the 7- or 2-repeat allele of the DRD4 gene, a genetic variant that is known to heighten individual’s sensitivity to cultural influences. We also present preliminary evidence that as a function of time the East Asians have stayed in the U.S., their brain becomes “Americanized” (i.e., increased OFC GM volume), but only if they are the carriers.

It has been long theorized that culture and brain constitute each other. Our paper, however, presents the first evidence that culture can shape the morphometric property of the human brain. This study opens up a new direction of research to look at how culture may “go deep under the skin” to influence the structural and functional organization of the brain.