The Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience looks at an article about the amygdala's response to fearful faces and how it is different between your own culture and other cultures. The amygdala specializes in threat detection and understands fearful facial expressions. The researchers in this study hypothesized that the amygdala response is greater in individuals of their own culture. This study was conducted on both native Japanese participants and Caucasian participants in the United States. Functional brain imaging was acquired at two neuro-imaging facilities. The Japanese participants were scanned at the National Institute of Physiological Sciences in Okazaki, Japan. Caucasian participants were scanned at the Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging in Charlestown, MA. Previously, neuroimaging studies had only looked at the response of the amygdala to emotional facial stimuli from the same cultural environment. This study went further and tested the amygdala response in participants from different cultures. There were 22 adult participants in the study: 12 native Japanese living in Japan (6 men and 6 women) and 10 Caucasians living in the United States (5 men and 5 women). The stimuli used to awaken the reactivity of the amygdala were 80 digitized grayscale images of faces that had different expressions. There were four facial expressions: neutral, happy, angry and fearful. The photos included 20 Japanese and 20 Caucasian men and women from the two groups. Participants were tested based on their self-identified culture. The experimenters who conducted the studies used the participants' native language. The independent variable in the study was the faces of different cultures and the dependent variable was the amygdala'... in the center of the card... I learned that humans are able to differentiate expressions between cultures. The common expression to fear something or feel threatened is easily identifiable. This is important in social psychology, where people are more likely to help others in situations. People may have greater amygdala reactivity toward faces of their own race because they feel more threatened when another individual is hurt or threatened. Social psychology studies show that people sympathize more with their own race, which explains the great reactivity of the amygdala. References Chiao, J. Y., Iidaka, T., Gordon, H. L., Nogawa, J., Bar, M., Aminoff, E. , Sadato, N., & Ambaday, M. (2008). Cultural specificity in the amygdala response to fearful faces. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 20(12), 2167-2174. Retrieved from http://www.stanford.edu/group/ipc/pubs/2008ChiaoJOCN.pdf