SPONTANEOUS ATTENTION TO WORD CONTENT VERSUS EMOTIONAL TONE: Differences Among Three Cultures

Abstract-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. Many Americans who interact with Asians such as Japanese and Filipinos for the first time often feel perplexed because their Asian friends do not seem to mean quite the same thing when they say "yes" as Americans mean when they say the same word (e.g., It has been proposed that in many Western, independent cultures and the languages used therein (e.g., European-American cultures and languages such as English), a greater proportion of information is conveyed by verbal content than by contextual cues (Ambady, Koo, In a recent series of experiments, we used a Stroop task and provided initial evidence that native English speakers spontaneously attend more to verbal content than to vocal tone, whereas native Japanese speakers spontaneously attend more to vocal tone than to verbal content The results showed cross-culturally divergent patterns of interference in the two judgments. Americans showed a strong interference effect in vocal-tone judgments. The response time for these judgments was much longer if the attendant verbal content was incongruous than if it was congruous. But a comparable interference effect in wordmeaning judgments was negligible. This is the evidence that attention was spontaneously allocated to word meaning in lieu of vocal tone. Japanese respondents showed a contrasting pattern. For them, the size of interference was somewhat larger in word-meaning judgments than in vocal-tone judgments. Although consistent with the hypothesis that Americans are attentionally attuned more to verbal content and Japanese are attuned more to vocal tone, this study was compromised by the particular stimulus materials used. Two issues deserve careful attention. First, the emotional valence of verbal content was more extreme than the emotional valence of vocal tone. If research is to yield unequivocal evidence for an attentional bias that favors either vocal tone or verbal content, it is important for the polarity of emotional verbal content and emotional vocal tone to be equated. Second, the American respondents in the study showed no interference effect in the word-meaning judgment. Taken at face value, this result implies that Americans pay no attention at all to vocal tone. The absence of interference, however, may be attributable to the fact that the vocal tones used in this study were quite weak. It is therefore highly desirable to test both Americans and Japanese with more explicitly emotional tones of voice. We expect that with such materials even Americans might show reliable interference by vocal tone in the word-meaning judgment, although the effect would likely be less strong than for Japanese speakers. Moreover, there remains a thorny issue of whether the phenomenon we observed was mediated by cultural processes or linguistic processes. In its most classic form, the linguistic relativity hypothesi