The effects of collectivistic and individualistic values on structure of the brain: A cross-cultural voxel-based morphometry study

Converging behavioral and functional neuroimaging evidence indicates that East Asian and Western individuals have different biases for processing information that may stem from contrasting cultural values. East Asians appear to be more sensitive to contextual information (i.e., holistic processing style) shaped by the collectivistic/interdependent culture. In contrasts, Westerners have a tendency to process focal and salient objects of the environment (i.e.g, analytic processing style) due to their individualistic/independent representation. In this cross-cultural MRI study, we used voxel-based morphometry (VBM) to investigate the structural brain differences of collectivistic and individualistic biases in East Asian and Western participants. Each participant's degree of endorsement of individualistic and collectivistic values was assessed by their self-report on the Singelis Self-construal Scale (SCS). Taiwanese rated higher SCS scores than Westerners in collectivistic value and Westerners rated higher SCS scores than Taiwanese in individualistic value (Taiwanese: -7.0; Westerners: 8.4; p<0.001). Using a voxel-wise threshold of family-wise error (FWE) p< 0.01, VBM results showed that Western group showed larger regional gray matter volume in the bilateral superior and inferior frontal gyrus, left parahippocampal gyrus, and subcortical regions, whereas Taiwanese had larger regional gray matter volume in the left inferior temporal gyrus (Brodmann Area 37). The results remained robust after controlling individual variations in language acquisition (i.e., monolingual, bilingual, or multilingual speakers). These findings are consistent with previous neuroimaging studies and provide evidence for the brain structural basis of individual differences in cultural values.