Related Experiment Video
Updated: May 24, 2026

Creating Virtual-hand and Virtual-face Illusions to Investigate Self-representation
Published on: March 1, 2017
Threat advantage: perception of angry and happy dynamic faces across cultures
Claudia Marinetti1, Batja Mesquita, Michelle Yik
1Center for Social and Cultural Psychology, University of Leuven, Leuven, Belgium. claudia.marinetti@psy.kuleuven.be
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.
Related Concept Videos
Facial Feedback Hypothesis
Factors Affecting Perception
An illustrative example of a perceptual set is the scenario where an airline pilot told...
Emotional Expression
Universal Facial Expressions
Psychologist Paul Ekman identified seven basic...
Dark Triad and Person Perception
Impression Management Techniques I: Managing Appearances
Therapeutic Communication
Verbal communication depends on language or a prescribed way of using words so that people can share information effectively. The critical aspects of verbal...

