In-Group Advantage and Other-Group Bias in Facial Emotion Recognition

Abstract

This chapter summarizes the body of work about cultural differences in emotion recognition based on the match versus mismatch of the cultural group expressing the emotion and the cultural group perceiving the emotion. Two major perspectives have arisen to explain the well-replicated empirical finding that there tends to be better recognition of facial expressions where there is a match. The first is the notion of in-group advantage, which is an information-based explanation, arguing that individuals are more accurate judging emotional expressions from their own cultural group versus foreign groups due to better information about culturally specific elements of emotional expression. The finding of systematic in-group advantage has led to the development of a recent dialect theory of emotion, which uses a linguistic metaphor to argue emotion is a universal language with subtly different dialects. Just as it is more challenging to understand someone speaking a different dialect in verbal language, it can be more challenging to recognize emotions that are expressed in a different dialect. This dialect theory has been the subject of controversy due to its implications for dominant theories about cross-cultural differences in emotion. A second perspective is the notion of out-group bias, which is a motivation-based explanation. Individuals may use decoding rules to understand out-group emotional expressions differently, or they may be less motivated to recognize the emotions of other individuals who are members of foreign cultures, even when they are merely lead to believe falsely that expressions originate elsewhere. Both of these theoretical mechanisms can act singly or simultaneously.