Culture and facial expressions of emotion

Abstract

With over a century of theoretical developments and empirical investigation in broad fields (e.g., anthropology, psychology, evolutionary biology), the universality of facial expressions of emotion remains a central debate in psychology. How near or far, then, is this debate from being resolved? Here, I will address this question by highlighting and synthesizing the significant advances in the field that have elevated knowledge of facial expression recognition across cultures. Specifically, I will discuss the impact of early major theoretical and empirical contributions in parallel fields and their later integration in modern research. With illustrative examples, I will show that the debate on the universality of facial expressions has arrived at a new juncture and faces a new generation of exciting questions.

Keywords:

• Culture
• emotion
• Facial expressions
• Categorical perception
• Modelling
• Top-down processing

Notes

¹ The procedure used to select “pure” facial expressions of primary emotions—the Facial Affect Scoring Technique (FAST; Ekman, Friesen, & Tomkins, 1971)—was unpublished at the time, and comprised a theory-based selection of Action Unit patterns.

² FACS-coded facial expression stimuli include the following datasets: Japanese and Caucasian Facial Expressions of Emotion (JACFEE; Matsumoto & Ekman, 1988), the Karolinska Directed Emotional Faces (KDEF; Lundqvist, Flykt, & Öhman, 1998), the Radboud Faces Database (RaFD; Langner et al., 2010), Pictures of Facial Affect (POFA; Ekman & Friesen, 1976b), Unmasking the Face-photo set (Ekman & Friesen, 1975), and Montreal Set of Facial Displays of Emotion (MSFDE; Beaupré, Cheung, & Hess, 2000).

³ Although Ekman (1968, 1970) and Friesen (1972) are widely cited in support of universality (e.g., Ekman, 1972; Ekman & Friesen, 1971; Ekman et al., 1987; Ekman, Rolls, Perrett, & Ellis, 1992), each lack peer review, with the last comprising an unpublished doctoral dissertation.

⁴ As detailed in Jack et al. (2009), East Asian participants comprised primarily Chinese nationals. Given that Chinese observers show no other-race effect when viewing Japanese faces from the JACFEE database (O'Toole, Deffenbacher, Valentin, & Abdi, 1994), Japanese and Chinese can therefore be considered—in the context of perception—“same race” (see Little & Sussman, 2010, for the history of the concepts of race).

⁵ The Berinmo and English groups provided judgements of categorical rather than physical similarity.

⁶ Note that Susskind et al. (2008) used fear and disgust facial expression stimuli from the JACFEE database, which, while posed by Western Caucasian, American Japanese, and Japanese nationals, are only recognized by Western observers.

⁷ Given that happy was not included in Marsh et al.'s analysis, further work is required to determine whether FACS-coded facial expressions of happy – a universally recognised facial expression – contain cultural accents.