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Searching for Happiness Across Cultures

Searching for Happiness Across Cultures <jats:sec><jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>Three experiments examined the cultural relativity of emotion recognition using the visual search task. Caucasian-English and Japanese participants were required to search for an angry or happy discrepant face target against an array of competing distractor faces. Both cultural groups performed the task with displays that consisted of Caucasian and Japanese faces in order to investigate the effects of racial congruence on emotion detection performance. Under high perceptual load conditions, both cultural groups detected the happy face more efficiently than the angry face. When perceptual load was reduced such that target detection could be achieved by feature-matching, the English group continued to show a happiness advantage in search performance that was more strongly pronounced for other race faces. Japanese participants showed search time equivalence for happy and angry targets. Experiment 3 encouraged participants to adopt a perceptual based strategy for target detection by removing the term 'emotion' from the instructions. Whilst this manipulation did not alter the happiness advantage displayed by our English group, it reinstated it for our Japanese group, who showed a detection advantage for happiness only for other race faces. The results demonstrate cultural and linguistic modifiers on the perceptual saliency of the emotional signal and provide new converging evidence from cognitive psychology for the interactionist perspective on emotional expression recognition.</jats:p> </jats:sec> http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Journal of Cognition and Culture Brill

Searching for Happiness Across Cultures

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Publisher
Brill
Copyright
© 2010 Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands
ISSN
1567-7095
eISSN
1568-5373
DOI
10.1163/156853710X497185
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

<jats:sec><jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>Three experiments examined the cultural relativity of emotion recognition using the visual search task. Caucasian-English and Japanese participants were required to search for an angry or happy discrepant face target against an array of competing distractor faces. Both cultural groups performed the task with displays that consisted of Caucasian and Japanese faces in order to investigate the effects of racial congruence on emotion detection performance. Under high perceptual load conditions, both cultural groups detected the happy face more efficiently than the angry face. When perceptual load was reduced such that target detection could be achieved by feature-matching, the English group continued to show a happiness advantage in search performance that was more strongly pronounced for other race faces. Japanese participants showed search time equivalence for happy and angry targets. Experiment 3 encouraged participants to adopt a perceptual based strategy for target detection by removing the term 'emotion' from the instructions. Whilst this manipulation did not alter the happiness advantage displayed by our English group, it reinstated it for our Japanese group, who showed a detection advantage for happiness only for other race faces. The results demonstrate cultural and linguistic modifiers on the perceptual saliency of the emotional signal and provide new converging evidence from cognitive psychology for the interactionist perspective on emotional expression recognition.</jats:p> </jats:sec>

Journal

Journal of Cognition and Culture – Brill

Published: Jan 1, 2010

Keywords: HAPPINESS ADVANTAGE; LANGUAGE; EMOTION; CULTURE; VISUAL SEARCH

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