Agency and facial emotion judgment in context

Area of Science:

• Cross-cultural psychology
• Social cognition
• Nonverbal communication

Background:

• Previous research indicates East Asians incorporate background facial emotions more than North Americans when evaluating target faces.
• This holism in East Asians contrasts with a potential North American tendency to downplay background emotions, possibly due to viewing facial emotions as volitional internal states.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate if different types of contextual information (salient landscapes vs. background facial emotions) differentially influence face evaluation across cultures.
• To examine the role of cultural conceptualizations of agency and meaning systems in cross-cultural perception.

Main Methods:

• Three studies were conducted involving European Canadians and East Asians.
• Participants rated the intensity of target facial emotions presented alongside either affectively salient landscape sceneries or background facial emotions.

Main Results:

• Affectively salient landscapes influenced face evaluation judgments in both European Canadians and East Asians.
• European Canadians, but not East Asians, demonstrated a tendency to downplay background facial emotions during face evaluation.

Conclusions:

• Cultural differences exist in how contextual information, specifically background facial emotions, affects face perception.
• Conceptualizations of agency and cultural meaning systems likely underpin these cross-cultural variations in processing social cues.