The Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience reviews an article on the amygdala's response to fearful faces and how it differs between one's own culture and other cultures. The amygdala is specialized for detecting threats and understands fearful facial expressions. The researchers in this study hypothesized that the amygdala response is greater in individuals from their own culture. This study was conducted with Japanese and Caucasian participants in the United States. Functional brain imaging was acquired at two neuroimaging 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 Biomedical Imaging Center in Charlestown, Massachusetts. Previously, neuroimaging studies had only observed the amygdala response to facial emotional stimuli from the same cultural environment. This study went further and tested the amygdala response in participants from different cultures. The study included 22 adult participants: 12 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 elicit amygdala responsiveness were 80 digitized grayscale images of faces with different expressions. There were four facial expressions: neutral, happy, angry and fearful. The photos were of 20 Japanese men and women and 20 Caucasians, taken from both groups. Participants were tested based on their own 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...... middle of paper ...... I learned that human beings are capable of differentiating expressions between cultures. The common expression of fearing something or feeling threatened is easily detectable. This is important in social psychology, where people are more likely to help others in certain situations. People may have greater amygdala reactivity to faces of their own race because they feel more threatened when another individual is harmed or threatened. Social psychology studies show that people empathize more with their own races, which explains the high reactivity of the amygdala. References Chiao, J. Y., Iidaka, T., Gordon, H. L., Nogawa, J., Bar, M., Aminoff, E., Sadato, N. and 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