Abstract
The current studies investigated cross-cultural emotion recognition in South Asian and Caucasian Canadian adults and children. The two main goals of the current research were to disentangle the effects of culture and race on cross-cultural emotion recognition and to chart the development of cross-cultural differences in emotion recognition. Both adults and children completed an emotion recognition task, viewing faces of four different racial/cultural groups (South Asian Canadians and immigrants, Caucasian Canadian and immigrants). Adults completed a cultural identification task with these four racial/cultural groups and a contact questionnaire that assessed their exposure to Caucasian and South Asian individuals. Findings revealed that Caucasian and South Asian Canadian adults showed cross-cultural differences in emotion recognition; however, children did not. Furthermore, adults were able to identify the cultural background of Caucasian and South Asian faces at above-chance levels. Finally, results indicated that higher levels of cross-cultural exposure were related to improved cross-cultural emotion recognition for Caucasian adults only.
Highlights
To investigate differences in reaction time, a repeated measures ANOVA was conducted with participant group (South Asian vs. Caucasian) as the between-subjects factor and face type (South Asian Canadian vs. South Asian immigrant vs. Caucasian Canadian vs. Caucasian immigrant) as the within-subject factor
To investigate age and cultural differences in reaction time, a repeated measures ANOVA was conducted with participant group (South Asian vs. Caucasian) and age as the between-subjects factors and face type (South Asian Canadian vs. South Asian immigrant vs. Caucasian Canadian vs. Caucasian immigrant) as the within-subject factor
Older children performed significantly better on Caucasian Canadian faces compared to South Asian Canadian faces (p = .012) and South Asian immigrant faces (p = .016)
Summary
The goal of this thesis is to investigate this debate further by extending previous research on cross-cultural emotion recognition. The Current Studies The goal of this thesis was to investigate cross-cultural differences in emotion recognition. Spontaneous expressions likely capture greater cultural variations in expressive style (Elfenbein & Ambady, 2003; Elfenbein, et al, 2007; Jack et al, 2012); it is very difficult to elicit and photograph genuine emotional expressions, especially in a laboratory setting. In the current study we aimed to elicit “free-posed” expressions. General Discussion The goals of this thesis were to investigate cross-cultural differences in emotion recognition by (1) disentangling the effects of race and culture and (2) charting the development of these differences
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