1. British face stimuli Egyptian face stimuli
CROSS-CULTURAL BIASES IN CATEGORISING EMOTIONS EXPRESSED IN BRITISH AND EGYPTIAN FACES
Mai Sala El Deen Helmy, ), Kun Guo(2), Petra M. J. Pollux(2)
(1) Menoufia University, EG; (2) University of Lincoln, UK
Background
Accuracy
British face stimuli Egyptian face stimuli
Anger
The universality hypothesis for decoding of facial expressions claims that all humans communicate six basic internal emotional states (happy, surprise, fear, disgust, anger, and sad) using the same facial movements (Susskind et al., 2008).
Other findings suggest cultural differences in the way some basic emotions are expressed (Jack et al., 2012), or categorized when no labels are used (Gendron et al., 2014). In addition, culture-specific decoding strategies have been associated with viewing of emotional faces (Jack et al., 2009).
The constructionist model suggests that emotions emerge when people give meaning to sensory input using knowledge and previous experience (Fugate, 2013). In this model, emotion words are used by the perceiver to create categorical boundaries.
Here we investigate cross-cultural differences in recognition of facial expressions (anger, fear, happy and sadness) using British and Egyptian face stimuli. Specifically, the aim was to investigate potential biases in categorizing emotional expression from faces belonging to participants’ own culture or to the other culture. To explore subtle differences in labelling, 18 response options were provided which varied in valence and intensity from the intended emotions.
Fear
Happy
Examples of Egyptian face stimuli
Method
Participants: 93 British adults (16 men, 79 women, Age= 21±1.1) and 133 Egyptian adults (12 men, 117 women, Age= 20.4±0.25),.
Task: Egyptian face stimuli were created for the purpose of this study. British face stimuli were selected from the Karolinska Directed Emotional Faces (KDEF). The whole stimulus set consisted of 80 faces (10 female and 10 male models with 4 facial expressions). Each face stimulus was presented with 18 response options. The task was self-paced, stimuli were presented with Qualtrics.
Sad
Results and Conclusions
‘Own-culture’ angry and sad faces were more frequently labelled with the intended emotional expression (‘face image set’ (Egyptian vs. British) × ‘intended emotion’ (anger, fear, happiness and sadness) × ‘response options’ (18): [F=74.1; p<0.001, partial eta-squared=0.25]. The alternative label most often selected for anger was ‘irritation’ by British participants and ‘bored’ by Egyptian participants. The culture-specific bias for anger could be associated with subtle cultural differences in conceptual associations between emotional labels and expressions of anger, irritation and boredom (e.g. Fugate, 2014, Elfenbein et al., 2003, 2010; Jack et al, 2012). Alternatively, the findings could result from culture-specific facial expression decoding strategies reflected in eye-movements (Jack et al., 2009). Possible explanations will be investigated in future studies.
Allowing participants to choose from more response options results in low accuracy for angry and fearful faces in particular. Fear was more often categorized as surprise by participants of both countries and for both sets of face stimuli, consistent with previous findings (Elfenbaum, 2002).
Percentage correct responses was similar for Egyptian and British participants, yet higher for the British faces (48.8%) compared to Egyptian faces (36.7%). The latter findings suggests that expressions were more ambiguous in the new stimulus set.
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