Concepedia

Placing the face in context: Cultural differences in the perception of facial emotion.

Takahiko Masuda, Phoebe C. Ellsworth, Batja Mesquita, Janxin Leu, Shigehito Tanida, Ellen Van de Veerdonk

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology · 2008 · 702 citations · 58 references

TL;DR

Westerners tend to interpret facial emotions as isolated individual feelings, whereas Japanese observers view them as inseparable from the emotions of surrounding people. The authors examined whether Japanese, more than Westerners, incorporate social context when judging facial emotions. In Study 1, participants viewed cartoons of a central person with a happy, sad, angry, or neutral expression surrounded by others displaying either the same or a different emotion. Japanese, but not Westerners, were influenced by the surrounding people’s emotions when judging the central person’s expression, a pattern linked to greater attention to contextual faces as shown by eye‑tracking.

Abstract

Two studies tested the hypothesis that in judging people's emotions from their facial expressions, Japanese, more than Westerners, incorporate information from the social context. In Study 1, participants viewed cartoons depicting a happy, sad, angry, or neutral person surrounded by other people expressing the same emotion as the central person or a different one. The surrounding people's emotions influenced Japanese but not Westerners' perceptions of the central person. These differences reflect differences in attention, as indicated by eye-tracking data (Study 2): Japanese looked at the surrounding people more than did Westerners. Previous findings on East-West differences in contextual sensitivity generalize to social contexts, suggesting that Westerners see emotions as individual feelings, whereas Japanese see them as inseparable from the feelings of the group.