Universals and Cultural Differences in Recognizing Emotions
- 1 October 2003
- journal article
- Published by SAGE Publications in Current Directions in Psychological Science
- Vol. 12 (5), 159-164
- https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8721.01252
Abstract
Moving beyond the earlier nature-versus-nurture debate, modern work on the communication of emotion has incorporated both universals and cultural differences. Classic research demonstrated that the intended emotions in posed expressions were recognized by members of many different cultural groups at rates better than predicted by random guessing. However, recent research has also documented evidence for an in-group advantage, meaning that people are generally more accurate at judging emotions when the emotions are expressed by members of their own cultural group rather than by members of a different cultural group. These new findings provide initial support for a dialect theory of emotion that has the potential to integrate both classic and recent findings. Further research in this area has the potential to improve cross-cultural communication.Keywords
This publication has 13 references indexed in Scilit:
- Nonverbal “Accents”Psychological Science, 2003
- When familiarity breeds accuracy: Cultural exposure and facial emotion recognition.Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2003
- Cultural Similarity's ConsequencesJournal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 2003
- On the universality and cultural specificity of emotion recognition: A meta-analysis.Psychological Bulletin, 2002
- Is there an in-group advantage in emotion recognition?Psychological Bulletin, 2002
- Methodological requirements to test a possible in-group advantage in judging emotions across cultures: Comment on Elfenbein and Ambady (2002) and evidence.Psychological Bulletin, 2002
- Facial expression and emotion.American Psychologist, 1993
- The effects of language on judgments of universal facial expressions of emotionJournal of Nonverbal Behavior, 1992
- Cultural Influences on the Perception of EmotionJournal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 1989
- Representative design and probabilistic theory in a functional psychology.Psychological Review, 1955