Cultural norms influence nonverbal emotion communication: Japanese vocalizations of socially disengaging emotions

Nonverbal vocalizations of some emotions have been found to be recognizable both within and across cultures. However, East Asians tend to suppress socially disengaging emotions because of interdependent views on self-other relationships. Here we tested the possibility that norms in interdependent cultures around socially disengaging emotions may influence nonverbal vocal communication of emotions. Specifically, we predicted that East Asians' vocalizations of socially disengaging emotions would be less recognizable to Westerners than those of other emotions. To test this hypothesis, we performed a balanced cross-cultural experiment in which 30 Dutch and 30 Japanese listeners categorized and rated Dutch and Japanese vocalizations expressing nine emotions including anger and triumph, two socially disengaging emotions. The only condition for which recognition performance failed to exceed chance level was Dutch listeners' judgments of Japanese anger vocalizations, p = .302. The magnitude of the in-group advantage (i.e., enhanced recognition accuracy when producer and perceiver cultures match) was also largest for Japanese anger vocalizations out of all the 18 conditions investigated, p < .001. The second largest in-group advantage was obtained for Japanese triumph vocalizations, p < .001. In addition, Dutch listeners rated Japanese vocalizations of anger and triumph as less intense, negative/positive, and aroused than did Japanese listeners, ps < .001. Taken together, these findings suggest that East Asian-specific cultural norms of interpersonal relationships are associated with specificity in nonverbal vocal communication of socially disengaging emotions, especially anger, to the point that some signals can only be understood by individuals who are culturally familiar with them. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).