Cultural Differences in Mentally Evoked Haptic Exploratory Procedures between Asia, Europe, and North America

In the cosmetics industry, an understanding of the meaning of skin sensory words in foreign language is of critical importance to facilitate the development of cosmetics that satisfy global consumers. Our previous study observed the possibility of cross-cultural differences in evoked haptic exploratory procedures (HEPs) between countries, specifically in relation to skin sensory words with the same lexical meaning. To explore these cultural differences in tactile sensory words of the skin, this study investigated mentally evoked HEPs in participants from five main markets for the cosmetics industry. We asked the participants for their mentally evoked HEPs, and then conducted principal component analysis on the results to understand the differences between the skin sensory words from the characteristics of components of mentally evoked HEPs. We found that the numbers and interpretation of the principal components were different across the five countries. The principal components of the HEPs were described as weight and direction (pressing or stroking). These findings confirm that there are skin sensory words with the same lexical meaning in different languages, which nevertheless evoke different mental HEPs and help decode cultural differences in tactile perceptions.