Culture shapes emotion perception from faces and voices: changes over development

Area of Science:

• Developmental psychology
• Cross-cultural psychology
• Social cognition

Background:

• Cultural background influences the perception of multisensory emotion cues.
• East Asians typically rely more on vocal affective cues than Westerners.
• It remains unclear if these cultural differences manifest in childhood.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate cross-cultural similarities and differences in emotion perception across age groups.
• To determine the developmental trajectory of modality weighting in emotion perception.
• To examine cultural influences on the integration of facial and vocal emotion cues in children and adults.

Main Methods:

• Simultaneous presentation of faces and voices expressing congruent or incongruent emotions.
• Participants judged whether the expressed emotion was happy or angry.
• Comparison of emotion perception strategies between East Asian and Western children and adults.

Main Results:

• East Asian adults showed greater reliance on vocal cues compared to Western adults, replicating prior research.
• Young children from both cultural groups primarily relied on visual (facial) information.
• Reliance on vocal cues increased with age in East Asian participants, but not in Western participants.

Conclusions:

• Cultural background significantly impacts developmental changes in processing facial and vocal affective information.
• Early childhood emotion perception shows cross-cultural similarities, with a primary reliance on visual cues.
• Cultural factors shape the developmental emergence of modality preferences in multisensory emotion perception.