# Immigration modulates audiovisual emotional processing in adults: is this really an influence of the host culture?

## TL;DR

This study shows that immigrants from Western countries to Japan gradually shift their emotional processing style to rely less on voices over time, possibly due to language and cultural adaptation.

## Contribution

The study reveals how migration duration affects audiovisual emotional processing and brain responses in immigrants.

## Key findings

- Immigrants showed reduced voice influence with longer stays in Japan.
- Longer stays correlated with increased brain activity in regions linked to emotional integration.
- Immigrants' processing style diverged from native Japanese voice-dominance tendencies.

## Abstract

Individuals from Western cultures rely on facial expressions during the audiovisual emotional processing of faces and voices. In contrast, those from East-Asian cultures rely more on voices. This study aimed to investigate whether immigrants adopt the tendency of the host culture or whether common features of migration produce a similar modification regardless of the destination.

We examined how immigrants from Western countries to Japan perceive emotional expressions from faces and voices using MRI scanning.

Immigrants behaviorally exhibited a decrease in the influence of emotions in voices with a longer stay in Japan. Additionally, immigrants with a longer stay showed a higher response in the posterior superior temporal gyrus, a brain region associated with audiovisual emotional integration, when processing emotionally congruent faces and voices.

These modifications imply that immigrants from Western cultures tend to rely even less on voices, in contrast to the tendency of voice-dominance observed in native Japanese people. This change may be explained by the decreased focus on prosodic aspects of voices during second language acquisition. The current and further exploration will aid in the better adaptation of immigrants to a new cultural society.