Authors: Damjanovic, Ljubica¹; Roberson, Debi²; Athanasopoulos, Panos³; Kasai, Chise⁴; Dyson, Matthew²

Source: Journal of Cognition and Culture, Volume 10, Numbers 1-2, 2010 , pp. 85-107(23)

Publisher: BRILL

Abstract:

Three experiments examined the cultural relativity of emotion recognition using the visual search task. Caucasian-English and Japanese participants were required to search for an angry or happy discrepant face target against an array of competing distractor faces. Both cultural groups performed the task with displays that consisted of Caucasian and Japanese faces in order to investigate the effects of racial congruence on emotion detection performance. Under high perceptual load conditions, both cultural groups detected the happy face more efficiently than the angry face. When perceptual load was reduced such that target detection could be achieved by feature-matching, the English group continued to show a happiness advantage in search performance that was more strongly pronounced for other race faces. Japanese participants showed search time equivalence for happy and angry targets. Experiment 3 encouraged participants to adopt a perceptual based strategy for target detection by removing the term 'emotion' from the instructions. Whilst this manipulation did not alter the happiness advantage displayed by our English group, it reinstated it for our Japanese group, who showed a detection advantage for happiness only for other race faces. The results demonstrate cultural and linguistic modifiers on the perceptual saliency of the emotional signal and provide new converging evidence from cognitive psychology for the interactionist perspective on emotional expression recognition.

Keywords: EMOTION; HAPPINESS ADVANTAGE; CULTURE; LANGUAGE; VISUAL SEARCH

Document Type: Research article

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/156853710X497185

Affiliations: 1: Department of Psychology, University of Chester, Parkgate Road, Chester CH1 4BJ, UK;, Email: l.damjanovic@chester.ac.uk 2: School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering, University of Essex, Colchester CO4 3SQ, UK 3: School of Linguistics & English Language, University of Bangor, Bangor, Gwynedd LL57 2DG, UK 4: Faculty of Regional Studies, University of Gifu, 1-1 Yanagido, Gifu 501-1193, Japan

Publication date: 2010-04-01

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