Brain Fit: How Culturally Fitting Neural Patterns Relate to Well-being

Research has noted potential benefits to having a fit between a person’s cultural background and the surrounding cultural context, termed cultural fit. For example, researchers have found that a better fit between individual’s social orientation beliefs and their country’s social orientation is related to greater reported well-being. Expanding on these findings, our research used a social flanker task to see if a fit between culturally expected neural patterns and individual’s neural patterns relates to greater well-being. To address this question, we had European Canadians and East Asians new to Canada do a social flanker task while collecting EEG data. The social flanker task involved congruent lineups, which all showed the same emotions (either happy or sad), and incongruent lineups, with a center face that had emotions that differed from that of surrounding faces (in happy and sad combinations). For our main neural measure, we looked at how much more people were conflicted by incongruent lineups, compared to congruent lineups. Recently studies have found that the more interdependent East Asians show increased conflict to incongruent lineups compared to congruent lineups, whereas the more independent European Canadians show no difference in conflict between the two. This pattern was replicated in this study. In addition, we found that for both European Canadians and East Asians in Canada the independent social orientation pattern of showing less conflict to incongruent emotions, which fits the Canadian context, was related to a greater reported well-being. This provides evidence that the culture fit story also fits our neural processes.