Searching for Happiness Across Cultures

Abstract

Three experiments examined the cultural relativity of emotion recognition using the visual search task. Caucasian-English and Japanese participants were required to search for an angry or happy discrepant face target against an array of competing distractor faces. Both cultural groups performed the task with displays that consisted of Caucasian and Japanese faces in order to investigate the effects of racial congruence on emotion detection performance. Under high perceptual load conditions, both cultural groups detected the happy face more efficiently than the angry face. When perceptual load was reduced such that target detection could be achieved by feature-matching, the English group continued to show a happiness advantage in search performance that was more strongly pronounced for other race faces. Japanese participants showed search time equivalence for happy and angry targets. Experiment 3 encouraged participants to adopt a perceptual based strategy for target detection by removing the term 'emotion' from the instructions. Whilst this manipulation did not alter the happiness advantage displayed by our English group, it reinstated it for our Japanese group, who showed a detection advantage for happiness only for other race faces. The results demonstrate cultural and linguistic modifiers on the perceptual saliency of the emotional signal and provide new converging evidence from cognitive psychology for the interactionist perspective on emotional expression recognition.

Contrasting vertical and horizontal representations of affect in emotional visual search

“…We applied identical truncation parameters as used in our earlier work (Damjanovic et al, 2010) to calculate mean RT for correct responses for each cell of the design, excluding RTs less than 100 ms or greater than 2000 ms (3.82 %).…”

“…Consenting participants gave written informed consent. The number of participants was deemed satisfactory in terms of statistical power based on our own previous studies using similar sample sizes in the same task (e.g., Damjanovic et al, 2010) and previous emotional visual search studies (e.g., Williams, Moss, Bradshaw & Mattingley 2005).…”

“…Target detection performance was measured using RT recorded from the onset of each trial to participant response and percentage errors on 'different' trials (Damjanovic et al, 2010). Given that the main hypotheses of interest predicted interactions along the vertical and horizontal dimensions, we investigated the effects of location on emotion detection performance separately for the two dimensions using two 2 (target: angry or happy) × 2 (location: top or bottom/left or right) repeated measures ANOVAs for each dependent variable (see also Chasteen et al, 2010;Crawford et al, 2006, for separate analyses for vertical and horizontal locations).…”

“…Given the novelty of these results and their theoretical relevance to contemporary models of representational thought, we sought to replicate the prioritisation of the vertical metaphor for happy faces in a procedurally identical study, by using more realistic facial stimuli (Song, Vonasch, Meier & Bargh, 2012). Applying cropping templates to remove extraneous facial characteristics (e.g., hairline, neck, ears, etc), whilst common in visual search studies of this kind (e.g., Calvo & Nummenmaa, 2008;Damjanovic et al, 2010;Williams et al, 2005), may limit the overall ecological validity of the facial stimulus (Burton, 2013). In order to address this particular concern, Experiment 2 utilized the same experimental design, but presented participants with facial stimuli that were intact and in full colour.…”

“…In the present study, we addressed this issue by employing an emotion perception task in which happy or angry faces appeared on screen in four different spatial locations together with three neutral faces, and in which response times and error rates were recorded in participants' detection of the discrepant target face, a visual search task designed by Damjanovic, Roberson, Athanasopoulos, Kasai and Dyson (2010). Only one published study has so far used emotional facial expressions to study conceptual mappings (Lynott & Coventry, 2014).…”