Cultural differences in gaze and emotion recognition: Americans contrast more than Chinese.
We investigated the influence of contextual expressions on emotion recognition accuracy and gaze patterns among American and Chinese participants. We expected Chinese participants would be more influenced by, and attend more to, contextual information than Americans. Consistent with our hypothesis, Americans were more accurate than Chinese participants at recognizing emotions embedded in the context of other emotional expressions. Eye-tracking data suggest that, for some emotions, Americans attended more to the target faces, and they made more gaze transitions to the target face than Chinese. For all emotions except anger and disgust, Americans appeared to use more of a contrasting strategy where each face was individually contrasted with the target face, compared with Chinese who used less of a contrasting strategy. Both cultures were influenced by contextual information, although the benefit of contextual information depended upon the perceptual dissimilarity of the contextual emotions to the target emotion and the gaze pattern employed during the recognition task.
Department of Psychology, and Volen Center for Complex Systems, Brandeis University, MA 02454-9110, USA. jts@brandeis.edu
Jennifer Tehan
JT
Stanley
Xin
X
Zhang
Helene H
HH
Fung
Derek M
DM
Isaacowitz
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D003431:Cross-Cultural Comparison; D004644:Emotions / Q000502:physiology*; D005133:Eye Movements / Q000502:physiology*; D005149:Facial Expression; D005260:Female; D006723:Hong Kong; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D021641:Recognition, Psychology / Q000502:physiology*; D014481:United States; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology; D055815:Young Adult