Apples and Oranges: Methodological Requirements for Testing a Possible Ingroup Advantage in Emotion Judgments from Facial Expressions

Abstract

Author's Note I thank Marija Drezgic, Shannon Pacaoa, Janice Cheng, Aaron Estrada, and Victoriya Tebeleva for their assistance in the general laboratory program. Correspondence concerning this chapter should be addressed to David Matsumoto, Department of Psychology, San Francisco State University, 1600 Holloway Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94132; telephone (415) 338-1114, fax (510) 217-9608, or e-mail at dm@sfsu.edu.b. Introduction The ability to recognize certain facial expressions of emotion is universal. Studies reported more than thirty years ago provided the first systematic and reliable evidence of this (Ekman, 1972; Ekman & Friesen, 1971; Ekman, Sorenson, & Friesen, 1969; Izard, 1971), and those studies have been replicated time and again by different researchers using different methodologies (Elfenbein & Ambady, 2002b; Matsumoto, 2001). A recent meta-analysis including 168 data sets involving judgments of emotion in different cultures summarized this area and indicated that the core components of emotion recognition are pancultural and likely biological (Elfenbein & Ambady, 2002b). However, there are also cultural differences in emotion judgments. One of the first studies that documented cultural differences reported correlations between Hofstede's cultural dimension data (Hofstede, 1980, 1984) with accuracy rates of judgments of universal facial expressions of emotion across cultures in an ecological analysis (Matsumoto, 1988). Subsequent studies showed that cultural differences existed between Americans and Japanese (Matsumoto, 1992), and then across a broader range of cultures (Biehl et al., 1997) and ethnic groups (Matsumoto, 1993), and in bilinguals depending on the language in which they are tested (Matsumoto & Assar, 1992).