Americans weigh an attended emotion more than Koreans in overall mood judgments.

Face ensemble coding is the perceptual ability to create a quick and overall impression of a group of faces, triggering social and behavioral motivations towards other people (approaching friendly people or avoiding an angry mob). Cultural differences in this ability have been reported, such that Easterners are better at face ensemble coding than Westerners are. The underlying mechanism has been attributed to differences in processing styles, with Easterners allocating attention globally, and Westerners focusing on local parts. However, the remaining question is how such default attention mode is influenced by salient information during ensemble perception. We created visual displays that resembled a real-world social setting in which one individual in a crowd of different faces drew the viewer's attention while the viewer judged the overall emotion of the crowd. In each trial, one face in the crowd was highlighted by a salient cue, capturing spatial attention before the participants viewed the entire group. American participants' judgment of group emotion more strongly weighed the attended individual face than Korean participants, suggesting a greater influence of local information on global perception. Our results showed that different attentional modes between cultural groups modulate social-emotional processing underlying people's perceptions and attributions.

Advanced Meditation Alters Resting-State Brain Network Connectivity Correlating With Improved Mindfulness.

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of an intensive 8-day Samyama meditation program on the brain functional connectivity using resting-state functional MRI (rs-fMRI). Methods: Thirteen Samyama program participants (meditators) and 4 controls underwent fMRI brain scans before and after the 8-day residential meditation program. Subjects underwent fMRI with a blood oxygen level dependent (BOLD) contrast at rest and during focused breathing. Changes in network connectivity before and after Samyama program were evaluated. In addition, validated psychological metrics were correlated with changes in functional connectivity. Results: Meditators showed significantly increased network connectivity between the salience network (SN) and default mode network (DMN) after the Samyama program (p < 0.01). Increased connectivity within the SN correlated with an improvement in self-reported mindfulness scores (p < 0.01). Conclusion: Samyama, an intensive silent meditation program, favorably increased the resting-state functional connectivity between the salience and default mode networks. During focused breath watching, meditators had lower intra-network connectivity in specific networks. Furthermore, increased intra-network connectivity correlated with improved self-reported mindfulness after Samyama. Clinical Trials Registration: [https://clinicaltrials.gov], Identifier: [NCT04366544]. Registered on 4/17/2020.