Nakamura Anna K, Yamamoto Hisako W, Takagi Sachiko, Matsuda Tetsuya, Okada Hiroyuki, Ishiguro Chiaki, Tanaka Akihiro
School of Arts and Sciences, Tokyo Woman's Christian University, Tokyo, Japan.
Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, Tokyo, Japan.
Front Psychol. 2025 Jan 29;16:1533274. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1533274. eCollection 2025.
Individuals from Western cultures rely on facial expressions during the audiovisual emotional processing of faces and voices. In contrast, those from East-Asian cultures rely more on voices. This study aimed to investigate whether immigrants adopt the tendency of the host culture or whether common features of migration produce a similar modification regardless of the destination.
We examined how immigrants from Western countries to Japan perceive emotional expressions from faces and voices using MRI scanning.
Immigrants behaviorally exhibited a decrease in the influence of emotions in voices with a longer stay in Japan. Additionally, immigrants with a longer stay showed a higher response in the posterior superior temporal gyrus, a brain region associated with audiovisual emotional integration, when processing emotionally congruent faces and voices.
These modifications imply that immigrants from Western cultures tend to rely even less on voices, in contrast to the tendency of voice-dominance observed in native Japanese people. This change may be explained by the decreased focus on prosodic aspects of voices during second language acquisition. The current and further exploration will aid in the better adaptation of immigrants to a new cultural society.
西方文化背景的个体在对面部和声音进行视听情感处理时依赖面部表情。相比之下，东亚文化背景的个体更多地依赖声音。本研究旨在调查移民是否会采用东道国文化的倾向，或者迁移的共同特征是否会产生类似的变化，而不论目的地如何。
我们使用MRI扫描检查了从西方国家移民到日本的人如何感知面部和声音中的情感表达。
随着在日本停留时间的延长，移民在行为上表现出声音中情感影响的降低。此外，停留时间较长的移民在处理情感一致的面部和声音时，在颞上回后部（一个与视听情感整合相关的脑区）表现出更高的反应。
这些变化表明，与以日语为母语者中观察到的声音主导倾向相反，来自西方文化的移民倾向于更少依赖声音。这种变化可能是由于在第二语言习得过程中对声音韵律方面的关注减少所致。当前及进一步的探索将有助于移民更好地适应新的文化社会。
