Cultural Differences in Perceiving Transitions in Emotional Facial Expressions: Easterners Show Greater Contrast Effects than Westerners

Past research suggests that East Asians (Easterners) are more likely than North Americans and Western Europeans (Westerners) to incorporate information from concurrent affective contexts when judging facial expressions. The present research extends this literature by investigating the impact of temporal affective contexts on emotion perception. Specifically, two experiments tested the hypothesis that when judging smiles, Easterners are more likely than Westerners to be influenced by preceding facial expressions. In Experiment 1, participants from China and Canada judged the valence of low-intensity smiles that were preceded by expressions of anger or high-intensity smiles. The results indicated that, compared to Canadian participants, Chinese perceivers were more influenced by preceding expressions, with larger differences in perceived valence of smiles preceded by different start emotions. Experiment 2 investigated whether this pattern of findings generalized to other Western populations and to other emotional transitions. Participants from China and the Netherlands judged the valence of (high- or low- intensity) smiles preceded by angry, fearful, or neutral expressions. Consistent with Experiment 1, Chinese participants' judgments of smiles were impacted more by the preceding expressions, a finding that was stable across emotions. Together, these findings demonstrate that Easterners, relative to Westerners, are influenced more by the preceding temporal emotional context when judging others' current smiling facial expressions.