Understanding Patterns of Emotion Perception and Expression Across Cultures

Abstract

The aim of this three-paper dissertation is to investigate cultural differences between East Asians and European Americans in how they perceive and express emotions. Broadly, I look at emotional expressions of both cultural groups in three ways, through facial expressions only, with face and the context combined, and through emotion expression online. In the first paper, I present evidence that East Asians more frequently perceive mixed emotions from facial expressions than European Americans do. Building on these results, in the second paper I couple contextual information with facial expression and test the idea that East Asians may not believe facial expressions are an authentic indicator of genuine feelings, perhaps because they are more likely to experience constraints themselves on the expression of emotion, particularly negative emotion in the presence of others. We found both expected and unexpected results from a series of studies. This social dimension to emotion expression and perception is further explored in the third paper, which consists of a series of studies that investigate emotional expression through the use of emoticons online. We found that East Asians are more expressive than European Americans in their use of emoticons.