Communicating emotion through drawings across cultures

People use drawings to convey how they feel, yet we know little about how culture shapes such representations and how viewers from different cultures perceive them. We examined whether emotion recognition from drawings was better explained by the emotion-dialect account, which predicts an ingroup recognition advantage, or by the historical-heterogeneity account, which predicts a general recognizability advantage for drawings from historically heterogeneous societies. Across two production studies, Canadian and Chinese expressers produced drawings depicting seven emotion categories. Canadian expressers used a more focal graphic style than Chinese expressers: Their drawings contained fewer objects, covered more of the page, and relied more on bodily cues. Across four recognition studies, Canadian, Chinese, and Indian perceivers judged these drawings, with Indian perceivers providing a third-culture test of overall recognizability. Among Canadian and Chinese perceivers, recognition was generally more accurate when expressers and perceivers shared a cultural background than when they did not. Across studies, however, Canadian drawings showed no reliable overall recognition advantage over Chinese drawings. These findings were consistent with the emotion-dialect account but provided little support for the historical-heterogeneity account. Exploratory analyses further showed that some drawing features were associated with overall recognition accuracy, but none was reliably associated with the ingroup advantage. Together, these findings extend previous research on faces and voices by showing that emotion communication through drawings is alsoculturally patterned. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).