Revisiting Cultural Differences in Emotion Perception between Easterners and Westerners: Chinese Perceivers are Accurate, but See Additional Non-intended Emotions in Negative Facial Expressions

It is well established that East Asians (Easterners) are poorer at categorizing some emotional facial expressions than are North Americans and West Europeans (Westerners). We hypothesized that rather than Easterners failing to identify the intended emotions, they are more likely than Westerners to perceive multiple concurrent emotions. To test this hypothesis, we asked Chinese and Dutch participants to rate theoretically based facial expressions (Western prototypes from the Facial Action Coding System [FACS]) in Experiment 1, and empirically based facial expressions from each culture (Chinese and Dutch) in Experiment 2. Across experiments, both groups of perceivers consistently rated intended emotions higher than non-intended emotions, irrespective of emotion type and of whether the expressions were static or dynamic. Furthermore, Chinese participants produced smaller differences in ratings between intended and non-intended emotions than did Dutch participants. Machine learning based categorization supported the possibility that Chinese participants' poorer categorization performance on forced-choice emotion categorization tasks can be explained by their tendency to perceive intended as well as non-intended emotions in facial expressions. Together, these results suggest that Chinese are more likely than Dutch to see multiple concurrent emotions in facial expressions, thus shedding new light on the role of culture in emotion perception.