 Well, first of all, I'd like to thank FBR and everybody involved in this, Rob and Connie and everybody else who made this wonderful conference possible. And I think this is a great stepping stone for further development of the field that include culture, brain, human mind, and genetics. Thank you so much. Well, today I'd like to talk about my own research on culture itself with some additional data on my own adventure into neuroscience. But I'd like to place this research in somewhat larger historical perspective by very quickly reviewing what happened in the field that has maybe two decades or three decades and tried to place it in the current research within this framework. So background, well, cultural research, research on culture, obviously, can be traced back to many years ago. Some can trace it back to ISO, obviously, and many anthropologists in the 19th century and so on. But current endeavor, which is called cultural psychology, really started out in 1980s or 1990s when Rob advised a ricturer in Chicago, said, culture and psychification are up. And I think this statement really caused a lot of problems among psychologists. Some psychologists simply ignore it. Rick is a little eccentric anyway. It was easy for psychologists to ignore it. Some other psychologists took it more seriously. Okay, it does make sense to say that human psychology makes up culture. After all, culture cannot be such without some kind of activity of human psychological systems. But what's the point in saying that culture can make up psychology isn't the case. Psychology is very much that of analyzing and processing and producing out of the basis of the analysis on the basis of input. So basically, psychological system as a processing structure and processing system, if you believe this cognitive psychology assumption, it's very hard to even be understanding how come that culture can make up the human psyche. So that really was a study point. And around the time, many students of developmental psychology, social psychology began taking this statement very seriously to try to find out how it can be that this happens. Now, question is how to figure it out and know the new. And this was our way of addressing it. And COI already gave very crisp description of it. This is obviously very, very, very simplistic. But you have to start from somewhere. And once you start it out, things can get very muddy and very complicated, very, very, very quickly. But here's a conceptual framework. Essentially, there are very different worldviews, models of the self. The concept of the self may be culturally independent. And mind may not be purely natural, but the human mind itself might be shaped in some way in accordance with the model of the person that is being shared in the human cultural context. I think that's kind of a general statement we try to make. And in addition to that, we try to make a point that as a consequence of this, even what psychologists regard as basic psychological processes might be shaped in some significant way as a result of this interaction between human mind and cultural model that is way in which culture is set up according to the conception of a person which is hell and those in the human culture. Now, really, this is a very, very dominant framework. Fortunately, unfortunately, I don't know. We call it one model independent, and the other model interdependent. And we claim that the independent model is relatively more dominant in Western cultural context. Now, it's very clear that it's true with respect to the North American middle class population. Much less true in working class population, and less true even in Western Europe. But here's an independent culture in North America. And we contrasted this with interdependent cultural views, which is more dominant in each Asian cultural context. Now, it's given to be clearer this interdependent model with a variety of different variants are more dominant in many other parts of the world. So that's part of the basis of Steve Hyde and his groups claim that North Americans are really weird. And in the last 20 years or so, there are many, many cross-cultural experiments which are typically followed by cultural priming experiments, the investing aid. But you might revert as a cause of mechanism of cultural reasons. And this really, as a result of this endeavor, fairly replicable set of phenomenon emerge. And now the field, try to grow after this. And field is trying to develop in several important directions. First of all, it's really important to go far beyond East and West. There are many other areas. And also, going beyond independence and interdependence, maybe higher social class, socioeconomic status, those are the times which are maybe hopefully building in the point. And going beyond college and graduate. And by the way, much of this research is based on college and graduate. But recently, we conducted study, very large-scale study, in part in collaboration with Seattle, but in part in collaboration with other people to show that many of the findings I'm going to talk about today are pretty replicable, at least as concerned, as far as Americans and Japanese are concerned. So it's not really limited to college and graduate. However, it's very important to explore much larger population. And finally, cultural neuroscience. Here, I like to say something about it. All right, so before going to cultural neuroscience, here's a paper which we published 20 years ago. It's amazing. And here, here's a table which we used to summarize our hypothesis, our claim. And back then, strangely, in retrospect, we used the time construal, self-construal. And as a result of this, people regarded this as purely cognitive concept, that is conception of the self, cognitive psychological conception of the self as independent or interactive. And that's part of it. But really, what we meant by this was described in this little role in a table which we call cultural texts. We said that the cultural world is organized by this cultural model as independent or interdependent. But that means is that culture gives you, provides you with a whole bunch of conventions, routines, and practices, cultural texts which are designed by the previous generations so that you can do those tests to carry out what the culture we are as independent or interdependent. So for example, in a typical Western cultural context, be unique, expressing the self, realizing internal attributes, actualizing them, pursuing one's own goal, and all those things are cultural texts which are held in place in this cultural context. They are represented, they are shared in text books, socialization practices, and a whole bunch of things. And now interdependent selves are equally out there in terms of cultural practices. So those are the cultural texts which are available and if you are born into that particular cultural context, you pick up essentially, sometimes intentionally, some other times almost by necessity, you pick up some texts which are made up of or are possible by your particular circumstances to pick up your own texts to be a person. And as a consequence, by engaging in those texts, very much like cab drivers are driving their cabs, your brain may get transformed in the process. Now that's the context in which I found cultural neuroscience research really fascinating. It's really behavioral engagement in the culture and as a result of engagement, first of all, behavior might change. So Latin research has been done to investigate this possibility. So let me skip all those sliding slides to move on specific research. So this is a general concept and very simplified. There are whole bunch of cultural texts. You are born into a given cultural context. You choose, you pick up or you adopt some cultural texts to become a person essentially. The person you regard as decent and also other people in the same community would regard as decent and respectable. And as a consequence of keeping doing in and repeatedly engaging in those cultural texts over your own choice, your brain get transformed. So I'd like to see why I already did a wonderful job in describing the research of cells. So now I'd like to focus a bit on emotion, emotional regulation. Already Heejun Kim talked about emotional suppression yesterday and just that this slide is meant to illustrate some truth involved in the discussion of Heejun yesterday. This is a picture from tragedy in earthquake that hit Eastern Japan about 15 months ago. And here these are just horrible scenes but one particular picture I'd like to draw your attention to is not a picture of the victims. You know, those victims are very calm, very disciplined. It's almost presumably suppressing their emotions. That's blowing up. You might remember LA Times, New York Times and so on really highlighted those emotionless victims and trying to speak to what might happen to those people. You know, that seems like a horrible thing, but is it? Now, as Heejun mentioned yesterday, then there's quite a bit of studies on this topic. So we talked about independence, interdependence and presumably as a result of this, self-expression is very important. That's a cultural task in this Western cultural context. In Eastern cultural context, particularly East Asian cultural context, self-expression is not a big deal. That's not, certainly not prescribed cultural tasks. You are supposed to modulate your behaviors to be part of the community, blah, blah, blah. Those tasks are much more dominant than the fact Heejun has shown very nicely that European Americans share the value and the behavior of self-expression but that doesn't surely apply to East Asians. And Ginny Tsai, in a very related line of work, emphasized the significance of arousal in a genuine emotion. So corresponding to Heejun's work, Ginny Tsai argues that with evidence that high impact, high arousal emotions are much more valued in Western cultural context, particularly among Stambler agrargy. But that's not true. Much lower arousal cone emotions are valued among East Asians. Now, as you might expect, Asians say in the questionnaire that they suppress emotions more and also more interesting research by Mao and Bartler shows by using autonomic reaction patterns that European American subjects appear to be threatened when they try to suppress their anger. But Asians appear to be challenged when they are asked to suppress. And that's a pretty clear pattern of autonomic reactions where they're challenged as opposed to threatened. Now, on the basis of this, we ask this question, when what will happen when you are exposed to pictures like this? You know, some are neutral, that's fine. When you are shown some awful pictures like those that will happen, especially when you are asked to suppress, you are emotional expression. Two possibilities. In the current Western literature, the argument has been made with the evidence that people are capable of suppressing facial expression. Fine, but that has a consequence because they differ. European Americans never under-regulate internal processes of emotion. That's human nature. And presumably, because there's a conflict between your filthy emotion and your emotional behavior, your autonomic arousal systems really get excited and this has never had consequences and so on. Now, there's another possibility, however. Well, if you want to hurt your emotion, why don't you under-regulate it? You are internal experience. I think this is this, well, initial starting point of this research project is that this distinction might have nothing to do with human nature, you know? But this could be cultural, in the sense that how important it is to keep internal experience of emotion. Is it sacred in defining yourself or can it be manually controlled according to social goals, like suppressing emotions? So we use EEG signals to investigate, to what extent individuals might under-regulate their cortical processes when they ask to hide the emotion on the face, okay? And one particular element we looked into is called late-auster potential and this is very interesting potential that is happening in a parallel part of the brain and presumably catching up visual processing system activity. But, however, it is connected to sub-cortical emotional regions like amindala very closely so that what's happened is that when you find some emotional stimulus right in front of you, your attention is drawn to it and you begin to categorize it, you elaborate on the emotional information, contain that in the picture, so that there's a core type connection between emotional reaction and cognitive processing, okay? So the question we ask is that what does it happen when people have to suppress emotional expression? What do they have in this particular element? Cortical responses also under-regulated or cortical response kept in fact even when they try to suppress emotions. So procedure was pretty straightforward. Some people show one of those pictures at the time for a few seconds and in one condition, they ask to simply attempt to the picture. In the other condition, they are supposed to hide the emotion on the face so that the person who's observing them in the other room cannot tell which kind of pictures the subjects are looking at. And here are the results. This is an Asian wave form, well, Asian subjects are Asian-born Asians at the anniversary of mission. And European-American subjects are corresponding group of European-American subjects. And here, this is a controlled neutral picture condition. Here, emotional picture, negative picture condition. There's a very nice late positive potential and as far as this result is concerned, there is no cultural difference. Well, it appears that European-Americans are a little bit disreactive, but there's no significant difference. Now, in the emotional suppression condition, Asians initially showed just as equally strong emotional reaction initially, but this quickly disappeared as if they under-regulated this cortical response very, very effectively. However, European-Americans didn't show anything. And if you look at frontal part of the brain, that's very clear evidence that they are trying to do something or they are maybe suffering from the conflict they're experiencing. And so, it's not clear whether this represents ability or inability to regulate cortical response or unwillingness to do so. It seems to me that part of it is unwillingness. Culturally, it's not right. It's not right to suppress internal experience even when you have to hide the emotion with it. Now, one of the topics I'd like to refer to is related to what Steve talked about yesterday, self-enforcement. Again, this is a very interesting topic. A notion of self-interest is at the center of social and behavioral sciences. Now, self-interest has construed as personal bold pursuit you know, is that culturally universal or is that dependent on, you know, people growing up some particular cultural context. And, well, in the area of social psychology, this particular model, self-enhancement or pursuit of self-interest can be found in numerous ways, particularly self-advice is very, very strong. So, for example, when you succeed, you take credit for success and when you fail, you blame somebody else like your professor, we are fine. Okay, now, Steve, myself and lots of other people have worked on this entire set of phenomenon for a long time to show that there's quite a bit of cultural difference. So, for example, this is very simple distribution taken from Steve's work, distribution of mean score in Rosenberg's self-esteem score. Self-esteem scale and theoretical midpoint is early. So, clearly, lots of people have a very high self-esteem, you know. It's quite interesting. Now, human nature, now, if you look at each stage of the population, mean tends to correspond to theoretical mean. Okay, more recently, we looked at significance of the cell by using some of the more indirect tears by asking some objects to draw a sociogram that is the graphic representation of their social network. Use a sample to represent yourself and other people included in your network and why don't you draw this network by connecting those signs, right? Now, typical sociogram you find in the American sample looks like this. But this is not exaggeration, this is the real data, by the way. And typical graph you might, you would find in Japan looks like this. And simply one very interesting replicable finding consigns the size of the cell. Now, we believe that this republic right really represents something when you have to draw a map of LA, you expand your real estate to depict real important things like your house or UCLA. And very much like this, western population use much bigger cell, bigger sample to represent themselves, but this doesn't happen. All right, now, very quickly, we wanted to see if this is merely self-presentation, immodesty is a horrible thing. In China or Japan, and this is the kind of response that you can control relatively easily. So again, we wanted to use neuro-measures to address this question, okay? So here, we use very simple cognitive tasks, flanker tasks, you have to perform very well to arm point, but in one condition, subjects at all, that they can arm point to get one of those things, wonderful gift for themselves. In the other condition we told them, you have to work really hard to arm point so that you can get one of those gift to your friend you nominate for which living on campus so that you can send the gift to those people. And we compare those two conditions by running very simple flanker task experiment so that they have to tell the center letter is H-O-I-S. And subjects often make an error, whenever they make an error, they show error-related negativity, big bump in negative direction. And this error-related negativity, ERP signal, depends on significance of the task. Much more is at stake, this goes up. So, well, we tested this, and this is EIN, this is happening from frontal part of the brain, and there's no real difference or any effects at the behavioral self-report level. Now EIN, this is European American Wave Forum in the friend condition, pretty clear EIN. Now self-condition, there's a big bump. So clearly they care about their performance when they are out in point for themselves, even though they claim that they work just as hard for their friends. Now, agents didn't show us. Now, why is that? Well, theoretically this must have something to do with interdependence. If you have interdependence self-construal, you are friends, it's part of you. Very much like if you are good mother, good father, you are kid, it's part of you, right? And if that's the case, this effect might be mediated by interdependence, and in fact, that was the case. Yeah, well this maybe seems like a very straightforward story except it's very interesting fact that this kind of correlation happens again and again and again with brain measures, but unfortunately, unfortunately, I've never done anything like this. Well, I was using reaction time, social judgment, so there's something very special and peculiar about the brain measures. Anyway, so let me summarize by briefly discussing what all this might mean in the context of my discussion on the on about the nature of cultural influence. We believe the central concept is neuroplasticity, brain can change plastically, even though basic structure remains very much the same. Now, this happens as a result of repeated engagement in cultural tasks, and then really here, social science research is very important to figure out what kind of cultural tasks are available. Maybe ecology is important, maybe philosophy is important, maybe politics is important. Now, as a neuroscientist, a psychologist, really another interesting question is the fact that it happened once the brain get changed plastically. One thing that happens is that you are spontaneous behavior change. You know, your brain is programmed so as to respond in culturally appropriate way, you end up showing that behavior. And that's a good thing. That's provide very good evidence that you are a good person. You have the audience, you have the audience who will bring out you as a decent person once you do this, okay? Then you cannot do it, you get into the role. Very much like strange Japanese wandering into American street or vice versa, right? Now, a question that happened is that your identity is established and the reputation could be enhanced and this obviously has some consequences. Your success or your failure in work may fall or very much correspondingly, your success or failure in biological reproduction market may also fall and that's where evolutionary genetic consideration may well come in. So obviously I have no time to get into this but I'd like to share this with you to make very simple point that conference like this is very, very much needed because to understand neuropsychology of human being, we really need to understand social sociological, political analysis of the cultural context as well as psychology of identity making interpersonal processes of reputation and brain plasticity has a real power when it's placed in this broad context and from that point of view, I really find this conference so fascinating. So thank you very much.