Feeling the other Emotion interpretation in intercultural settings

Individuals are worse at reading facial expressions of emotions in outgroup members than in ingroup members. The goal of the current research was to study misinterpretations of emotional expressions across groups further. First, we report findings of 16 studies in which we tested whether people perceive less intense emotions in members of other groups compared to members of their own groups based on a meta-analysis over 13 studies and 3 cross cultural studies (Ntotal = 3517). We found initial evidence for the idea that people perceive outgroup members to feel less intense emotions than ingroup members and relate it to empathy gaps and infra-humanization mechanisms. Furthermore, we investigated how expressions of embarrassment can be perceived as disinterest in intergroup contexts, since both expressions share similar physical feature. This line of research shows that people perceived posed expressions of embarrassment as such in ingroup members, but perceived the same expression as disinterest in outgroup members (Ntotal = 1607). The affiliative function of embarrassment as restoring social relationships can thus have the opposite social function in intergroup contexts based on misinterpretations of the perceiver. Overall, our research suggests that emotion perception is a process of subjective interpretation rather than objective perception and that emotions are likely to have different, multi-facetted functions in pluralistic settings. More research on intergroup emotion interpretation is needed in order to facilitate smooth interactions between members of different groups.