Spontaneous attention to word content versus emotional tone: Differences among three cultures

• Main Authors: Ishii, Keiko, Reyes, Jose Alberto, Kitayama, Shinobu
• Format: text
• Published: Animo Repository 2003
• Subjects: Tone (Phonetics)—Cross-cultural studies; Semantics—Cross-cultural studies; Emotive (Linguistics)—Cross-cultural studies; Arts and Humanities; Educational Psychology
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/faculty_research/4422
• Institution: De La Salle University

A Stroop interference task was used to test the hypothesis that people in different cultures are differentially attuned to verbal content vis-à-vis vocal tone in comprehending emotional words. In Study 1, Americans showed greater difficulty ignoring verbal content than ignoring vocal tone (which reveals an attentional bias for verbal content); but Japanese showed greater difficulty ignoring vocal tone than ignoring verbal content (which reveals a bias for vocal tone). In Study 2, Tagalog-English bilinguals in the Philippines showed an attentional bias for vocal tone regardless of the language used, suggesting that the effect is largely cultural rather than linguistic. Implications for culture-and-cognition research are discussed.