There were no differences between groups in positive affect as measured by the PANAS prior and after the fMRI session (PANAS positive affect, main effect GROUP, Pre/Post fMRI and interaction n.s).. See Table 1 for mean values.
We found main effects in fMRI BOLD signal for reward, which overlapped with BOLD effects for maintenance of information, in the right superior frontal sulcus and bilateral intraparietal sulcus.
The cluster in the superior parietal lobule is located within a 5 mm radius of the main effect of synaesthesia in the fMRI study of Weiss et al. [14].
Regarding the main effect of stress patterns, our fMRI data yielded different results than the behavioral data.
Note that this pattern also holds when considering only the participants included in the fMRI analyses (interaction: F 1,18)=.05, p=.83; main effect: F 1,18)=5.87, p=.026).
See also Text S2 and Figure S2 for the fMRI analysis and discussion of a main effect of session.
In addition to the voxels identified by the main effect of congruency in the data of the POST fMRI session we defined further ROIs based on the respective unimodal (i.e., auditory and visual) contrasts between natural and artificial conditions.
Since area 44 showed the hypothesised main effect for priming, we further analysed the actual pattern in the fMRI data in area 44.
The fMRI data of all subjects were analysed for a main effect of factor 'group' to identify overall differences in brain activity between individualists and collectivists.
The fMRI analyses revealed striatal, midbrain, and neocortical activations for the main effect of expectation as well as for the expectation by stimulus-type interaction (Fig. 2).
