Hoersting, R. C. (2012). The effects of priming, culture, and context on perception of facial emotion, self-representation and thought: Brazil and the United States (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). University of North Texas, Texas.
Individualist and collectivist cultural approaches describe the relationship between an individual and his or her social surroundings. The current study had a two-fold purpose. The first was to investigate whether Brazilians, like other collective peoples, displayed more group self-representations, categorized items more relationally and paid more attention to context than Americans. The second purpose of this study was to investigate if counter-cultural primes played a role in activating either collective or individual selves. Both American (n = 100) and Brazilian (n = 101) participants were assigned either to a no-prime condition or a countercultural prime condition and then were asked to rate emotion cartoons, categorize items, complete the Twenty Statement Test (TST), and choose a representative object. As expected, unprimed Brazilian participants displayed more collectivist patterns on emotional (F[1,196] =10.1, p = .001, η² = .049; F[1,196] = 7.9, p = .006, η² = .038; F[1,196] = 9.0, p = .005, η² = .044) and cognitive (F[1, 196] = 6.0, p < .01, η² = .03) tasks than Americans. However, Brazilians offered more individualist self-representations (F[1, 195] = 24.0, p < .001, η² = .11) than American participants. Priming only had a marginal effect on item categorization (F[1,194] = 3.9, p = .051, η² = .02). Understanding such cultural differences is necessary in the development of clinicians’ multicultural competence. Therefore, these findings, along with the strengths and limitations of this study and suggestions for future research, are discussed.