Norm enforcement may be important for resolving conflicts and promoting cooperation. However, little is known about how preferred responses to norm violations vary across cultures and across domains. In a preregistered study of 57 countries (using convenience samples of 22,863 students and non-students), we measured perceptions of the appropriateness of various responses to a violation of a cooperative norm and to atypical social behaviors. Our findings highlight both cultural universals and cultural variation. We find a universal negative relation between appropriateness ratings of norm violations and appropriateness ratings of responses in the form of confrontation, social ostracism and gossip. Moreover, we find the country variation in the appropriateness of sanctions to be consistent across different norm violations but not across different sanctions. Specifically, in those countries where use of physical confrontation and social ostracism is rated as less appropriate, gossip is rated as more appropriate.
Despite consistently documented cultural differences in the perception of facial expressions of emotion, the role of culture in shaping cognitive mechanisms that are central to emotion perception has received relatively little attention in past research. We review recent developments in cross-cultural psychology that provide particular insights into the modulatory role of culture on cognitive mechanisms involved in interpretations of facial expressions of emotion through two distinct routes: display rules and cognitive styles. Investigations of emotion intensity perception have demonstrated that facial expressions with varying levels of intensity of positive affect are perceived and categorized differently across cultures. Specifically, recent findings indicating significant levels of differentiation between intensity levels of facial expressions among American participants, as well as deviations from clear categorization of high and low intensity expressions among Japanese and Russian participants, suggest that display rules shape mental representations of emotions, such as intensity levels of emotion prototypes. Furthermore, a series of recent studies using eye tracking as a proxy for overt attention during face perception have identified culture-specific cognitive styles, such as the propensity to attend to very specific features of the face. Together, these results suggest a cascade of cultural influences on cognitive mechanisms involved in interpretations of facial expressions of emotion, whereby cultures impart specific behavioral practices that shape the way individuals process information from the environment. These cultural influences lead to differences in cognitive styles due to culture-specific attentional biases and emotion prototypes, which partially account for the gradient of cultural agreements and disagreements obtained in past investigations of emotion perception.
Cultural differences in the perception of positive affect intensity within an advertising context were investigated among American, Japanese, and Russian participants. Participants were asked to rate the intensity of facial expressions of positive emotions, which displayed either subtle, low intensity, or salient, high intensity expressions of positive affect. In agreement with previous findings from cross-cultural psychological research, current results demonstrate both cross-cultural agreement and differences in the perception of positive affect intensity across the three cultures. Specifically, American participants perceived high arousal (HA) images as significantly less calm than participants from the other two cultures, while the Japanese participants perceived low arousal (LA) images as significantly more excited than participants from the other cultures. The underlying mechanisms of these cultural differences were further investigated through difference scores that probed for cultural differences in perception and categorization of positive emotions. Findings indicate that rating differences are due to (1) perceptual differences in the extent to which HA images were discriminated from LA images, and (2) categorization differences in the extent to which facial expressions were grouped into affect intensity categories. Specifically, American participants revealed significantly higher perceptual differentiation between arousal levels of facial expressions in high and intermediate intensity categories. Japanese participants, on the other hand, did not discriminate between high and low arousal affect categories to the same extent as did the American and Russian participants. These findings indicate the presence of cultural differences in underlying decoding mechanisms of facial expressions of positive affect intensity. Implications of these results for global advertising are discussed.
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