Placing the face in context: Cultural differences in the perception of facial emotion.

Abstract

Two studies tested the hypothesis that in judging people's emotions from their facial expressions, Japanese, more than Westerners, incorporate information from the social context. In Study 1, participants viewed cartoons depicting a happy, sad, angry, or neutral person surrounded by other people expressing the same emotion as the central person or a different one. The surrounding people's emotions influenced Japanese but not Westerners' perceptions of the central person. These differences reflect differences in attention, as indicated by eye-tracking data (Study 2): Japanese looked at the surrounding people more than did Westerners. Previous findings on East-West differences in contextual sensitivity generalize to social contexts, suggesting that Westerners see emotions as individual feelings, whereas Japanese see them as inseparable from the feelings of the group.

The cultural construction of emotions

“…Japanese respondents also perceived more emotions in athletes who were surrounded by others than did American respondents [38]. Moreover, in several emotion perception studies in which participants judged a target person's emotions [40,41], Japanese used the surrounding people's facial expressions to establish the target person's emotions, but Westerner did not. For instance, Japanese judged the smiling target to be less happy if the surrounding people portrayed angry or sad expressions.…”

Gender Differences in Emotional Content of EFL Written Narratives

“…To discuss about the results it must be confessed that some other factors like age and culture, which were not considered in this study and according to some researchers like Nisbett & Masuda, 2003, Masuda et al, 2008, Ko, et al, 2012, & Chaplin and Aldao (2012 are two other important factors in interpretation and expression of emotion, might have overshadowed gender influences on emotional expressions. For example about age factor, Gross, et al (1997) investigated age differences in emotional expression and found a consistent pattern.…”

Influencia cultural y universalidad en la expresión de las emociones. Una revisión sistemática de estudios recientes

“…Porcentaje de aciertos en los cambios contextuales y faciales de los personajes [Tomado de Masuda, 2008] A lo largo de este trabajo se han revisado diferentes estudios con resultados diversos acerca de la influencia cultural en la expresión de las emociones, y también estudios con resultados acerca de la existencia de una continuidad biológica (universalidad). Continuaremos esta revisión con un reciente trabajo («Facial expressions of emotion are not culturally universal») publicado en 2012 en pnas (revista oficial de la Academia Nacional de Ciencias de ee.…”