Chen and colleagues evaluated how culture influences responses to stimuli; their findings can likely be extended to experiencing design generally. The investigators report that “Native Mandarin speakers from China and native English speakers from the United States were presented with audiovisual emotional stimuli from their own culture (i.e., familiar) and from a different culture (i.e., unfamiliar) and asked to evaluate the emotion from one of the two modalities. Across modalities, the emotions were either the same (i.e., congruent, happy face, and happy voice) or different (i.e., incongruent, happy face, and sad voice). Results: When the input was in a familiar cultural context, American participants were more influenced by the visual modality, while Chinese participants were more influenced by the auditory modality. . . . When the input was in a less familiar cultural context, both groups showed increased visual dominance, but only the Chinese group simultaneously showed decreased auditory dominance. Conclusions: We conclude that cultural background and input familiarity interact to influence modality dominance during multisensory emotion perception.”
Peiyao Chen, Ashley Chung-Fat-Yim, Taomei Guo, and Viorica Marian. “Cultural Background and Input Familiarity Influence Multisensory Emotion Perception.” Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology, in press, https://doi.org/10.1037/cdp0000577