Threat advantage: Perception of angry and happy dynamic faces across cultures

Abstract

The current study tested whether the perception of angry faces is cross-culturally privileged over that of happy faces, by comparing perception of the offset of emotion in a dynamic flow of expressions. Thirty Chinese and 30 European-American participants saw movies that morphed an anger expression into a happy expression of the same stimulus person, or vice versa. Participants were asked to stop the movie at the point where they ceased seeing the initial emotion. As expected, participants cross-culturally continued to perceive anger longer than happiness. Moreover, anger was perceived longer in in-group than in out-group faces. The effects were driven by female rather than male targets. Results are discussed with reference to the important role of context in emotion perception.