Testing the Ingroup Advantage in Emotion Perception from Dynamic Posed and Spontaneous Expressions

Area of Science:

• Psychology
• Cross-cultural Psychology
• Nonverbal Communication

Background:

• The ingroup advantage suggests emotions are better recognized between individuals of the same cultural background.
• This phenomenon is well-documented for posed facial expressions but unclear for spontaneous ones.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the ingroup advantage in cross-cultural emotion recognition using both posed and spontaneous facial expressions.
• To examine cultural influences on emotion perception and expression.

Main Methods:

• A pre-registered, balanced design study involving 762 Dutch and 738 Chinese perceivers.
• Participants judged emotions from dynamic posed and spontaneous facial expressions from Dutch and Chinese expressors.
• A forced-choice emotion recognition task was employed.

Main Results:

• No mutual ingroup advantage was observed.
• A significant Decoder effect was found: Dutch perceivers outperformed Chinese perceivers in recognizing both Dutch and Chinese expressions.
• A significant Encoder effect was found: Chinese expressions were more accurately recognized than Dutch expressions by both Dutch and Chinese perceivers.

Conclusions:

• The ingroup advantage may not be as robust as previously thought, especially with spontaneous expressions.
• Findings highlight the importance of ecologically valid stimuli in nonverbal emotional communication research.
• Cultural factors influence emotion recognition, with both perceiver (decoder) and expressor (encoder) cultural backgrounds playing a role.