Abstract
The study attempted to replicate the findings of Masuda and colleagues (2008), testing a modified hypothesis: when judging people’s emotions from facial expressions, interdependence-primed participants, in contrast to independence-primed participants, incorporate information from the social context, i.e. facial expressions of surrounding people. This was done in order to check if self construal could be the main variable influencing the cultural differences in emotion perception documented by Masuda and colleagues. Participants viewed cartoon images depicting a happy, sad, or neutral character in its facial expression, surrounded by other characters expressing graded congruent or incongruent facial expressions. The hypothesis was only (partially) confirmed for the emotional judgments of a neutral facial expression target. However, a closer look at the individual means indicated both assimilation and contrast effects, without a systematic manner in which the background characters' facial expressions would have been incorporated in the participants' judgments, for either of the priming groups. The results are discussed in terms of priming and priming success, and possible moderators other than self-construal for the effect found by Masuda and colleagues.
Highlights
Starting with Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), the face came to be considered a central medium for emotional expression
In the early 1970’s, Darwin’s ideas about the universality of facial expression came to be widely accepted, as strong confirmation was provided by the research of Paul Ekman, which showed that expressions of emotions were recognized as communicating the same feelings by people from different cultures in Europe, North and South America, Asia, and Africa (Bull, 2002)
Maddux, and Masuda (2007) present evidence that Westerners and Easterners attend to different aspects of the face when judging emotion, with Japanese attending more to the eyes, while Americans attend more to the mouth
Summary
Starting with Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), the face came to be considered a central medium for emotional expression. Along the same lines, Masuda et al (2008) present evidence that Japanese participants seem to take surrounding social context into account when judging the emotion of an individual more than Americans do, i.e. the same smiling face is judged differently if it is displayed in a context with four other smiling faces, or with four other frowning faces. These differences were shown by eye-tracking to be of an attentional nature (Masuda et al, 2008)
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