Human faces are an omnipresent feature of daily life. Quite often, not a day goes by that we do not encounter another face – either in real life or, increasingly, in the digital sphere. Perhaps owing to this, faces are a significant source of information and capable of a large number of movements that serve clear communicative goals. Importantly, these facial expressions can be used to make inferences about others’ mental states, including their emotions (i.e., emotion recognition). There has been much interest, both among scientists and the general public, about the extent to which people are able to accurately detect emotions from others’ faces. This issue gave rise to the question of whether facial expressions of emotion are culturally specific or universal. If they are universal – they may be easily recognized among not only people of the same culture, but more broadly, across the globe creating the possibility of a universal nonverbal emotion language.
A number of studies have examined cross-cultural emotion recognition. However, a critical shortcoming to traditional approaches to studying emotion recognition is that works have predominantly employed highly posed, intense, and static expressions of Western adults, which may not necessarily reflect the complexity of real-life emotions. Very few studies have examined how individuals express and recognize emotions that are spontaneously produced. This is important because these studies would more closely and accurately reflect people’s real daily lives in which emotions are experienced and expressed spontaneously. Only by investigating whether real life emotional expressions can be accurately recognized across different cultures, we may be able to make conclusions about the universality of emotional facial expressions in real life.
We extend previous cross-cultural works by examining recognition and production of spontaneous emotional facial expressions in both Japan and the Netherlands. To understand the effects of culture-specific learning, we go a step further and take a developmental perspective investigating both children and adults’ recognition of spontaneous emotional facial expressions. In this study, we examine how children and adults in Japan and the Netherlands experience, express, and recognize spontaneously-evoked emotions. First, we induce emotions through videos known to evoke specific emotions, while recording participants’ facial expressions and self-reported emotional experience. Second, we show an independent group of observers the recordings of participants’ emotional displays, and ask them to indicate the emotions the individual in the video experienced. By comparing Dutch and Japanese children and adults, we can examine cultural specificity in the production and recognition of “real” emotions.
For this study, we are currently recruiting children aged 8-12 years as well as adults. If you are interested in participating in our study, please, follow this link.
