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

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. As different cultures have developed across the world, people have also differed in how they view the self, how the self relates to others, and how people relate to their social surroundings. These differences have often been conceptualized along an individualism-collectivism continuum (Hofstede 1980). Research studying these cross-cultural differences have relied on self-report measures (Singelis et al. 1995) and in some cases, behavioral tasks—most of which have focused on studying differences between Western and non-Western countries (e.g., Gelfand et al. 1996; Gouveia et al. 2003), especially between North American and East Asia. Few studies that evaluate cultural differences using behavioral tasks have focused on Latin America. The purpose of this study was to compare how Brazilians—not often an object of cross-cultural studies on individualism and collectivism (Torres and Pérez-Nebra 2015)—and Americans perform on tasks related to individualism and collectivism.