Abstract
Extant evidence points toward the role of contextual information and related cross-cultural variations in emotion perception, but most of the work to date has focused on judgments of basic emotions. The current research examines how culture and situational context affect the interpretation of emotion displays, i.e. judgments of the extent to which ambiguous smiles communicate happiness versus polite intentions. We hypothesized that smiles associated with contexts implying happiness would be judged as conveying more positive feelings compared to smiles paired with contexts implying politeness or smiles presented without context. In line with existing research on cross-cultural variation in contextual influences, we also expected these effects to be larger in Japan than in the UK. In Study 1, British participants viewed non-Duchenne smiles presented on their own or paired with background scenes implying happiness or the need to be polite. Compared to face-only stimuli, happy contexts made smiles appear more genuine, whereas polite contexts led smiles to be seen as less genuine. Study 2 replicated this result using verbal vignettes, showing a similar pattern of contextual effects among British and Japanese participants. However, while the effects of vignettes describing happy situations was comparable in both cultures, the influence of vignettes describing polite situations was stronger in Japan than the UK. Together, the findings document the importance of context information in judging smile expressions and highlight the need to investigate how culture moderates such influences.
Highlights
Inferring other people’s feelings and motives is a complex process that requires integrating cues from multiple channels (Ambady and Rosenthal 1992), including faces and their expressions
Japanese and Korean participants relied more on context descriptions than did Americans. These findings suggest that social context differentially influences emotion perception in Western and Eastern cultures
Results indicated that genuineness ratings of smiles seen in a happy context were significantly higher (M = 53.18, SD = 17.55) than ratings of the same smiles presented without context (M = 43.18, SD = 11.45), b= 10.40, SE = 2.85, t(119) = 3.66, p = 0.001
Summary
Inferring other people’s feelings and motives is a complex process that requires integrating cues from multiple channels (Ambady and Rosenthal 1992), including faces and their expressions. In a study by Ito et al (2013), intensity ratings of target facial emotion significantly varied with the emotion displayed by the people in the background Such contextual influence was only observed among Japanese but not European Canadians. When testing for the effects of verbal context information, Matsumoto et al (2010) found strong cultural differences in how facial expressions were judged in combination with vignettes describing emotion-eliciting situations. Study 2 investigated whether these effects generalise to verbal vignettes and whether culture plays a moderating role To this end, British and Japanese participants watched photographs of non-Duchenne smiles accompanied by verbal labels describing happy events or situations suggesting the need to be polite. We hypothesised that contextual influences would be more pronounced among Japanese than British observers
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