Perceptions of emotion from facial expressions are not culturally universal: evidence from a remote culture

Abstract

It is widely believed that certain emotions are universally recognized in facial expressions. Recent evidence indicates that Western perceptions (e.g., scowls as anger) depend on cues to U.S. emotion concepts embedded in experiments. Because such cues are standard features in methods used in cross-cultural experiments, we hypothesized that evidence of universality depends on this conceptual context. In our study, participants from the United States and the Himba ethnic group from the Keunene region of northwestern Namibia sorted images of posed facial expressions into piles by emotion type. Without cues to emotion concepts, Himba participants did not show the presumed "universal" pattern, whereas U.S. participants produced a pattern with presumed universal features. With cues to emotion concepts, participants in both cultures produced sorts that were closer to the presumed "universal" pattern, although substantial cultural variation persisted. Our findings indicate that perceptions of emotion are not universal, but depend on cultural and conceptual contexts.

Figure 1

Pile labels used by Himba and US participants. Mean number of words produced by each group (± standard error) is plotted on the y-axis broken down by word type. We observed cross-cultural differences in label use when participants were asked to freely sort facial expressions, (F_1,55=24.952, P<.001, η_p²=.312), and this effect was qualified by the type of label produced, (F_2,110=56.719, P<.001, η_p²=.508).

Figure 2

Six-cluster solutions derived from a hierarchical cluster analysis. The cluster analyses are plotted in A–D with cluster on the x-axis. The y-axis represents the number of items grouped into a given cluster, with contents stacked by the emotion portrayed in each posed facial expression. Stacked bars containing several different colors indicate that faces portraying different discrete emotions were clustered together. Bars with a single color (or predominance of a given color) indicate relatively clean clustering of faces depicting one emotion category. The US free sort (A) cluster solution contains discrete emotion (i.e., the presumed “universal”) clusters with the exception of cluster five, which appears to contain portrayals of both disgust and sadness. The Himba free sort (B) has three clear clusters (one through three) that map on to discrete emotion (i.e., the presumed “universal”) pattern. Both US (C) and Himba (D) conceptually anchored sorting appears to yield relatively distinct cluster solutions compared to free sorting.

Figure 3

Multidimensional scaling (MDS) solutions for free sorting of facial expressions. Free sort data are plotted in two-dimensional space for Himba (A) and US (B) participants. Anchored sort data are also plotting in two-dimensional space for Himba (C) and US (D) participants. Items are plotted by emotion type. Clearer evidence of the “universal solution” (closer clustering of facial expressions within the same emotion category) is more evident in the US solutions (B, D) than in the Himba solutions (A, C). We quantified the clustering of items within a category across all dimensions and plotted these mean distances (+/− standard error) for each cultural group in each task (E).