Neural Correlates of Trustworthiness Evaluations in Cross-Cultural Interactions
Abstract
Studies researching the neural correlates of implicit appearance-based trust evaluations have implicated a number of brain regions, including the amygdala, prefrontal cortices, posterior superior temporal sulcus and the fusiform gyrus. In cross-cultural studies of explicit trust judgments, the anterior cingulate cortex has been implicated, and in cross-cultural studies of emotion recognition, the cuneus has been implicated. In this study, I applied multivariate pattern analysis using a linear discriminator to demonstrate that the neural activation patterns in these regions in response to passively viewing videos of trustworthy and untrustworthy-appearing East Asian and Caucasian men are dissociable. I show that the dissociation of brain patterns in response to trustworthy and untrustworthy stimuli is not dependent upon magnitudes of activation, and it is similar for both East Asian and Caucasian participants.