Verified by 
Neuroscience
Brain and Culture at the Movies
Culture, emotions, and neural reactions to socially unexpected events.
Posted March 28, 2022 Reviewed by Devon Frye
Key points
- Cultural neuroscience (CN) is an interdisciplinary field that seeks to understand interplay of culture, mind, and the brain.
- Cultural experiences may influence how your brain perceives media such as movies.
- Scientists have measured specific neural activation patterns in response to experiencing a violation of social expectations.
It's that time of year; as of last night, the Oscar awards have been decided.
Most people have viewed comedy, horror, drama, and action films throughout their lives, and we generally feel that we know what to expect from each genre. What we cannot be certain of is whether another viewers' review will match our own or whether what they perceive as funny or scary is enough to warrant our own streaming or ticket purchase.
The simplest explanation of this uncertainty is that humans vary in what they like and don't like. However, it can be more complicated than this.
Cultural Neuroscience
The field of cultural neuroscience (CN) comprises interdisciplinary studies that seek to understand the relationship between culture, mind, and the brain (Kitayama & Park, 2010). Each day, we experience behaviors, thoughts, and emotions that can be explained by CN's combined use of anthropology, cultural studies, genetics, neuroscience, and psychology.
The different sociocultural lives that we have lived can influence how we think in general, or how we process social situations in our brains. This has been evidenced using neuroimaging techniques that can shed light on what happens in the brain in response to the sociocultural world. Our brains have been having such experiences since we were in the womb.
Cultural Narratives: The Live-Action Short Films
This year, I viewed the five films nominated in the Live Action Short category for the Oscar award. The films depict the following cultural narratives:
- a satire of the corporatized prison environment (Please Hold, U.S.)
- a Polish woman with dwarfism who works as a hotel maid (The Dress, Poland)
- the Kyrgyz sociocultural practice of bride kidnapping (Ala Kachuu: Take and Run, Kyrgyzstan/Switzerland)
- terrified South Asian family members who are citizens of the UK (The Long Goodbye, UK/Netherlands)
- a devoted Danish husband (On My Mind, Denmark)
The films are good international examples for analysis of the interplay of culture, mind, and brain reactions to them.
Emotional Arousal
This year’s Live Action Short nominees have been described as packing a punch. I felt the punch during scenes of some of the movies, as I was surprised by the lack of compassion and human dignity with often no foreshadowing of how emotionally intense events in some of the movies would get.
Neuroscientists have found that experiencing a violation of social expectations (for example as seen in The Dress) can show in the brain as measured by electroencephalogram (Portengen, Huffmeijer, van Baar, & Endendijk, 2022). My brain didn’t calmly receive these socioemotional hits; mirror neurons are relevant to the empathy we may feel when observing intense emotions in others (Krautheim, Steines, Dannlowski, Neziroğluac, Acosta, Sommer, Straube, & Kircher, 2020; Waters, 2014).
Culture and Reactions to Satire
A 2016 review of several cross-cultural studies of emotional arousal (Lim 2016) provided evidence that cultural differences in emotional arousal levels occur at a relatively early age. While watching one scene in Please Hold, for example, I noticed an emotional reaction from a few of the other moviegoers in the audience who happened to be white males.
I wondered, “Why did they laugh at that?” Their brains perceived humor in a scene for which I couldn't manage a chuckle nor smile. Although we have the same neuroanatomy, we had different brain reactions to, for me, a stressful satirical-intended scene of injustice enacted against an innocent Latino male.
Research exists comparing Eastern and Western cultural perceptions of humor (Jiang, Li, & Hou, 2019). Relatively absent from research investigations are cultural and neuroscientific studies of people of African descent to understand their culturally-based perceptions and neural reactions to satire and other types of humor. This is a research area for future exploration in cultural neuroscience.
African-American filmmaker Spike Lee's film, Bamboozled (2000), is a satire about anti-Black racism in the television industry. It was deemed a controversial and offensive flop two decades ago, but upon re-release, it's being perceived more favorably. Humans differ in culture and worldviews; we can expect that all movie scenes won't equally entertain all culturally-shaped brains.
References
Jiang, T. Li, H., & Hou, Y. (2019). Cultural differences in humor perception, usage, and implications. Frontiers in Psychology, 29, https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00123
Kitayama, S. & Park, J. (2010). Cultural neuroscience of the self: understanding the social grounding of the brain. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 5, (2-3), 111-129. https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsq052
Krautheim, J. T., Steines, M., Dannlowski, U., Neziroğluac, G., Acosta, H., Sommer, J., Straube, B., & Kircher, T. (2020). Emotion specific neural activation for the production and perception of facial expressions. Cortex, 127, 17-28. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2020.01.026
Lim, N. (2016). Cultural differences in emotion: Differences in emotional arousal level between the east and west. Integrative Medicine, 5(2), 105-109, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.imr.2016.03.004
Portengen, C. M., Huffmeijer, R., van Baar, A. L., & Endendijk, J. J. (2022). Measuring the neural correlates of the violation of social expectations: A comparison of two experimental tasks. Social Neuroscience, 17(1), 58-72, doi:10.1080/17470919.2022.2032327.
Waters, T. (2014). Of looking glasses: Mirror neurons, culture, and meaning. Perspectives on Science, 22(4), 616-649. https://doi.org/10.1162/POSC_a_00152.
