Social Neuroscience and Culture

Social Neuroscience and Culture

PSYC 213a

Spring 2014; Tuesdays & Fridays 11am-12:30pm

Psychology Department, BrandeisUniversity

Instructors: Prof. Angela Gutchess

Contact information:Office: Brown 107; Phone: 6-3247

E-mail:

Office Hours:By appointment (please plan meetings a couple of days in advance)

I. Course Aims and Objectives:

This course serves as an introduction to empirical research on social neuroscience and culture, with roughly half of the semester devoted to each topic.

Specific Learning Objectives:

By the end of this course, students should be able to:

-Understand how cognitive neuroscience methods can contribute to the understanding of social processes. Compare and contrast different cognitive neuroscience methods and understandat a general level how these methods operate

-Consider the ways in which culture can shape cognitive and social processes.

-Understand some of the challenges facing the use of experimental methods to study culture or social processes.

-Critically evaluate and synthesize research and methods on social neuroscience and culture.

-Generate research questions pertaining to culture or social neuroscience that warrant future investigation.

II. Format and Procedures:

The assigned readings will focus on primary research papers. The course will be structured using a combination of instructor- and student-led activities, with both leading class discussions.

Students are expected to participate actively in class discussions. I encourage you to take this opportunity to explore your strengths and weaknesses as a learner in a classroom setting. Reflect on how you can further push yourself to express your thoughts in different ways that will improveyourcomprehension of the material, your interpersonal communication skills, and your classmates’ insights into the course topics.

III. Course Schedule:

Jan 14 & 17 / Overview of Topics on Social Neuroscience
Jan 21 & 24 / fMRI Methods; Lesion Method (dissociations social & nonsocial) / Discussion of Critiques 1/24
Jan 28 & 31 / Trusting Others; Impression Formation
Feb 4 & 7 / Thinking about the Self;
Thinking about Groups/Stereotyping / Critique due of **one** reading from 2/4-2/7 (turn in before class)
Feb 11 & 14 / Influencing and Empathizing with Others; Social Status / Critique due of **one** reading from 2/11-2/14
Feb 18 & 21 / No Class / Midterm break
Feb 25 & 28 / Introduction to Culture; What is culture? Study of different groups
March 4 7 / Biculturalism and Priming; Self across Cultures
March 11 14 / Person Perception across Cultures; Traits across Cultures / 2-pg proposal due 3/17 by 9am.
March 18 21 / Emotions and Culture; Culture, Language, and Embodiment; / Critique due of 3/18 or 3/21 paper (not Diamond).
March 25 & 28 / Culture & Support; Culture & cognitive processes / Critique due of 3/25 or 3/28 paper
April 1 & 4 / Culture & development;
TBA
April 8 & 11 / TBA; Culture & cognition: A neuroscience perspective
April 15-22 / No class / Passover and spring break
April 25 / CurrentState of Cultural Neuroscience
April 29 / Wrap-up & Presentation of class projects / Final paper due Fri May 2nd by 5pm

IV. Course Requirements:

1.Class attendance and participation:

20% of grade (attendance and participation)

You are expected to attend each class, do the readings in advance, think about points for discussion, and come prepared to ask questions and discuss the material. I typically do not waive attendance, with the logic being that the entire semester will show your pattern of attendance (e.g., if you have a one-time emergency, your grade will absorb it, vs. having several absences). However, in the case of an emergency or extenuating circumstances, please talk to me (and I appreciate being informed if you know in advance that you have to miss class).

For the participation portion of the grade, engaging in class discussions as an active participant is the most obvious (and objective) way to earn credit. However, I will define participation broadly (including such things as office hour visits, attitude, and attentiveness) to allow for my subjective evaluation of your effort. Occasionally there may be written activities in class that I will collect to further assess your class participation. Based on past experience I have found that grading participation too leniently prevents me from recognizing exceptional effort in the class, which has led me to adopt this policy. The assignments will emphasize written communication skills, and I would like you to foster your ability to communicate and reflect orally upon course topics as well. Please come see me if you find it difficult to contribute regularly to discussions, and we can work on strategies.

2.Leading class discussion:

20% of grade

Students will lead discussion on the assigned readings for one class. It is imperative that you do not simply lecture! Classes should be largely discussion-based; seek creative ways to involve your classmates and make the material relevant. In brief, you will be graded on coverage of major issues from the readings, critical evaluation of the readings (e.g., asking thoughtful questions; relating readings to broader topics), integration of additional material into class (e.g., reading supplemental material and bringing this knowledge to class) and creativity in your methods to involve the class. I am available for meetings in advance to assist you in planning your discussion.

Dates: Sign-ups for a class will take place during the second week of class.

3. Critiques of Readings

20% of grade

For four weeks during the term, you will select one of the readings for that week and write an approximately 1-page (max 2 pages) critical summary and review of the paper. Please bring a hard copy of a typed critique to class to submit. Whileyou can choose a reading to critique from two class periods, yours MUST BE SUBMITTEDDURING(or before) THE CLASS for the reading you chose. They cannot be submitted the following class, after we have discussed the reading as a class. You also MAY NOT SELECT A READING TO CRITIQUE FROM THE DATE YOU LEAD DISCUSSION. Further instructions and relevant exercises will be covered in class (likely on 1/24/14).

4. Final research project and paper

10% of grade (proposal); 25% of grade (final paper); 5% final presentation

In the latter half of the course, you will design and collect preliminary data on a cross-cultural research question in groups of approx 3 students. The final paper will be the write-up of your group project. Some class time and exercises will be devoted to developing a study idea (with some examplesideas provided) and designing appropriate methods. You will be responsible for collecting some preliminary data and analyzing these outside of class, and I am available outside of class to advise on this. Based on my experience teaching this course before, I anticipate that the groups will be able to develop protocols in time to collect enough preliminary data to be able to say something about the question you’ve posed. However,the expectations for this will be adjusted as needed. My primary goal is for you to gain an appreciation for the challenges and issues that arise when designing and implementing a study on culture, and the early stages of the project should accomplish this (i.e., all is not lost for this exercise if you don’t collect a lot of data).

While you will work in groups, each student will write their own individual final paper. I suspect these will be approx15 pages. I expect the format to be like a final research paper; should we not accomplish much data collection (which I anticipate is unlikely), it will be formatted like a 10-page proposal. I will provide more details about the expectations and requirements before each deadline.

Deadlines: Proposal (2 pages) due March 17th @ 9am by email:

Class presentations will take place on the last day of class, April 29th

Final draft due by 5pm Friday, May 2nd, bye-mail:

V. Policies on written assignments

1. Please use APA format. Please talk to me well in advance of the deadlines should you be unfamiliar with this. (I may consider approving another format, but talk to me in advance)

2. Late papers: Papers turned in after the deadline will be docked 10% for each day the paper is late, starting after the time of the deadline. Computer problems are no excuse.

3. Need some assistance with your paper? I encourage you to write drafts of papers in advance and to consult with me if needed. The Writing Program also offers helpful services:

VI. Academic Integrity

You are expected to be honest in all of your academic work. The University policy on academic honesty is distributed annually as section 5 of the Rights and Responsibilities handbook. Instances of alleged dishonesty will be forwarded to the Office of Campus Life for possible referral to the Student Judicial System. Potential sanctions include failure in the course and suspension from the University. If you have any questions about my expectations, please ask.

Any work submitted by a student in this course for academic credit must be the student's own work. Do not submit work that presents the ideas of others as one’s own, fails to properly cite sources, and/or lifts sentences or ideas from the works of others. If you wish to bring in an idea or a quote from an outside source and are uncertain how to cite them, please feel free to ask me how to reference it. You have been warned. I will not hesitate to bring any student caught cheating before the Academic Judiciary Board. If you are at all uncertain as to whether something you are doing would count as cheating, ask me before you turn it in.

VII. Accommodations for students with disabilities

If you are a student with a documented disability on record at BrandeisUniversity and wish to have a reasonable accommodation made for you in this class, please see us immediately.
VIII. Course Readings. Readings are likely to change from what is posted below – they will be available on LATTE at least a week before each class.

January17: Overview of Topics on Social Neuroscience

Lieberman, M. D. (2007). Social cognitive neuroscience: a review of core processes. Annual Review of Psychology, 58, 259-289.

Stanley, D. A. & Adolphs, R. (2013). Toward a neural basis for social behavior. Neuron, 80, 816-826.

January 21: fMRI Methods

Huettel, S. A., Song, A. W., & McCarthy, G. (2004). Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Ch. 11 & terminology.

Aron, A., Fisher, H., Mashek, D. J., Strong, G., Li, H., & Brown, L. L. (2005). Reward, motivation, and emotion systems associated with early-stage intense romantic love. Journal of Neurophysiology, 94, 327-337.

January 24: The Lesion Method; Dissociations between social and nonsocial information

Todorov, A., & Olson, I. (2008). Robust learning of affective trait associations with faces when the hippocampus is damaged, but not when the amygdala and temporal pole are damaged. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 3, 195-203.

Mitchell, J. P., Heatherton, T. F., & Macrae, C. N. (2002). Distinct neural systems subserve person and object knowledge. Proceedings of the NationalAcademy of the Sciences USA, 99(23), 15238-15243.

January 28: Trusting Others

Winston, J. S., Strange, B. A., O'Doherty, J., & Dolan, R. J. (2002). Automatic and intentional brain responses during evaluation of trustworthiness of faces. Nauret Neuroscience, 5(3), 277-283.

Wardle, M. C., Fitzgerald, D. A., Angstadt, M., Sripada, C. S., McCabe, K., & Phan K.L. (2013). The caudate signals bad reputation during trust decisions. PloS One, 8(6), e68884.

January 31: Impression Formation

Rule N. O., Moran J. M., Freeman J. B., Whitfield-Gabrieli S., Gabrieli J. D., Ambady N. (2011). Face value: amygdala response reflects the validity of first impressions. Neuroimage, 54, 734-741.

Mende-Siedlecki, P., Cai, Y., & Todorov, A. (2013).The neural dynamics of updating person impressions.Social, Cognitive, & Affective Neuroscience, 8, 623-631.

February 4: Thinking about the Self

Tamir, D.I., Mitchell, J.P. (2012). Disclosing information about the self is intrinsically rewarding. Proceedings of the NationalAcademy of Sciences, 109(21), 8038-8043.

Pfeifer, J. H., Kahn, L. E., Merchant, J. S., Peake, S. A., Veroude, K., Masten, C. L., Lieberman, M. D., Mazziotta, J. C., & Dapretto, M. (2013). Longitudinal change in the neural bases of adolescent social self-evaluations: Effects of age and pubertal development. Journal of Neuroscience, 33, 7415-7419.

February 7: Thinking about Groups; Stereotyping

Contreras, J.M., Schirmer, J., Banaji, M.R., & Mitchell, J.P. (2013).Common brain regions with distinct patterns of neural responses during mentalizing about groups and individuals. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 25, 1406-1417.

Quadflieg, S., Flannigan, N., Waiter, G. D., Rossion, B., Wig, G. S., Turk, D. J., & Macrae, C. N. (2011). Stereotype-based modulation of person perception. Neuroimage, 57(2), 549-557.

February 11: Influencing and Empathizing with Others

Deuker, L., Muller, A.R., Montag, C., Markett, S., Reuter, M., Fell, J., Trautner, P.,& Axmacher, N. (2013). Playing nice: a multi-methodological study on the effects of social conformity on memory. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 7, 79.

Gutsell, J.N. & Inzlicht, M. (in press). Using EEG mu-suppression to explore group biases in motor resonance. In B. Derks, D. Scheepers and N. Ellemers (Eds.). The Neuroscience of Prejudice. London: Psychology Press

February 14:Social Status

Muscatell, K. A., Morelli, S. A., Falk, E. B., Way, B. M., Pfeifer, J. H., Galinsky, A. D., Lieberman, M. D., Dapretto, M., & Eisenberger, N. I. (2012). Social status modulates neural activity in the mentalizing network. NeuroImage, 60, 1771-1777.

Hackman, D.A., Farah, M.J., & Meaney, M.J. (2010). Socioeconomic status and the brain: Mechanistic insights from human and animal research. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 11, 651-659.

February 25: Introduction to Culture

Markus, H. R., & Kitayama, S. (1991). Culture and the self: Implications for cognition, emotion, & motivation. Psychological Review, 98, 224-253.

Nisbett, R. E., & Masuda, T. (2003). Culture and point of view. PNAS, 100, 11163-11170.

February 28: What is culture? Study of different groups

Varnum, M. E. W., Grossmann, I., Kitayama, S., & Nisbett, R. E. (2010). The origin of cultural differences in cognition: The social orientation hypothesis. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 19, 9-13.

Henrich, J., Heine, S. J., & Norenzayan, A. (2010). The weirdest people in the world? Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 33, 61-83.

March 4: Biculturalism and Priming

Hong, Y. Y., Morris, M. W., Chiu, C. Y., & Benet-Martinez, V. (2000). Multicultural minds. A dynamic constructivist approach to culture and cognition. American Psychologist, 55, 709-720.

Morey. J.A., Oyserman, D., & Yoon, C. (2013). One without the other: Seeing relationships in everyday objects. Psychological Science, 24, 1615-1622.

March 7: Self across Cultures

Han, S. & Northoff, G. (2009). Understanding the self: A cultural neuroscience approach. Progress in Brain Research, 178, 203-212.

Chiao, J. Y., Harada, T., Komead, H., Li, Z., Mano, Y., Saito, D., Parrish, T. B., Sadato, N., & Iidaka, T. (2009). Dynamic cultural influences on neural representations of the self. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 22, 1-11.

March 11: Person Perception across Cultures

Freeman, J. B., Rule, N. O., & Ambady, N. (2009). The cultural neuroscience of person perception. Progress in Brain Research, 178, 191-201.

Rule, N. O., Ambady, N., Adams, R. B., Ozono, H., Nakashima, S., Yoshikawa, S., & Watabe, M. (2010). Polling the face: Prediction and consensus across cultures. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 98, 1-15.

March 14: Traits across Cultures

Zarate, M. A., Uleman, J. S., & Voils, C. I. (2001). Effects of culture and processing goals on the activation and binding of trait concepts. Social Cognition, 19, 295-323.

Na, J. & Kitayama, S. (2011). Spontaneous Trait Inference Is Culture-Specific: Behavioral and Neural Evidence. Psychological Science, 22, 1025-1032.

March 18: Emotions and Culture

Chentsova-Dutton, Y. E. & Tsai, J. L. (2010). Self-focused attention and emotional reactivity: The role of culture. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 98, 507-519.

Masuda, T., Ellsworth, P. C., Mesquita, B., Leu, J., Tanida, S., & De Veerdonk, E. V. (2008). Placing the face in context: Cultural differences in the perception of facial emotion. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 94, 365-381.

March 21: Culture, Language, and Embodiment

Winawer J., Witthoft N., Frank M. C., Wu, L., Wade, A. R., & Boroditsky, L. (2007). Russian blues reveal effects of language on color discrimination, PNAS, 104, 7780-7785.

Leung, A. K. & Cohen, D. (2007). The soft embodiment of culture: Camera angles and motion through time and space. Psychological Science, 18, 824-830.

Diamond, J. (2010). The benefits of multilingualism. Science, 330, 332-333.

March 25: Culture & Support (via Health and Religion)

Park, J., Kitayama, S., Karasawa, M., Curhan, K., Markus, H.R., Kawakami, N., Miyamoto, Y., Love, G.D., Coe, C.L., & Ryff, C.D. (2013). Clarifying the links between social support and health: Culture, stress, and neuroticism matter. Journal of Health Psychology, 18, 226-235.

Colzato, L.S., van Beest, I., van den Wildenberg, W.P.M., Scorolli, C., Dorchin, S., Meian, N., Borghi, A.M., & Hommel, B. (2010). God: Do I have your attention? Cognition, 117, 87-94.

March 28: Culture & cognitive processes

Kitayama, A. & Murata, A. (2013). Culture modulates perceptual attention: An event-related potential study. Social Cognition, 31, 758-769.

Schwartz, A. J., Boduroglu, A., & Gutchess, A. H. (in press). Cross-cultural differences in categorical memory errors. Cognitive Science.

April 1: Culture & development

Park, D. C., & Gutchess, A. H. (2006). The cognitive neuroscience of aging and culture. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 15, 105-108.

Wang, Q. (2006). Culture and the development of self-knowledge. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 15, 182-187.

April 4: TBA

April 8: TBA

April 11: Culture & cognition: A neuroscienceperspective

Hedden, T., Ketay, S., Aron, A., Markus, H.R., & Gabrieli, J.D.E. (2008). Cultural influences on neural substrates of attentional control. Psychological Science, 19, 12-17.

Goh, J. O., Chee, M. W., Tan , J. C., Venkatraman, V., Hebrank, A., Leshikar, E. D., et al. (2007). Age and culture modulate object processing and object-scene binding in the ventral visual area. Cognitive, Affective, and Behavioral Neuroscience, 7, 44-52.

April 25: CurrentState of Cultural Neuroscience

Chiao, J. Y. (2009). Cultural neuroscience: A once and future discipline. Progress in Brain Research, 178, 287-304.

Kitayama, S., & Uskul, A. K. (2011). Culture, mind, and brain: Current evidence and future directions. Annual Review of Psychology, 62, 419-449