National Cultures

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.

Ho and colleagues studied links between culture and preferences for visual art.  They report that their “research investigates the appreciation of visual arts cross-culturally by hypothesizing and testing a cultural-match effect (i.e., people tend to appreciate same-culture artworks more than they appreciate different-culture artworks). . . . naïve viewers from Poland and Hong Kong were presented with 128 visual artworks varying in artwork culture (West vs. East). . . .

Arshamian and teammates determined that worldwide people tend to find the same odors pleasant to smell.  As they report, they “asked 225 individuals from 9 diverse nonwestern cultures—hunter-gatherer to urban dwelling—to rank . . . odorants from most to least pleasant. Contrary to expectations, culture explained only 6% of the variance in pleasantness rankings, whereas individual variability or personal taste explained 54%. Importantly, there was substantial global consistency, with molecular identity explaining 41% of the variance in odor pleasantness rankings. . . .

New research verifies that sensory experiences vary by culture.  For a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences n international research team led by Elizabeth Margulis and Devin McAuley “asked hundreds of people what stories they imagined when listening to instrumental music. . . . listeners in Michigan and Arkansas imagined very similar scenes, while listeners in China envisioned completely different stories. . . .