Abstract
Previous studies showed that East Asians are more sensitive than North Americans to contextual information, and that the cultural differences in context sensitivity emerge in preschool children. Yet, little is known about whether this generalizes to children’s emotional judgments. The present study tested Canadian and Japanese preschool children and examined cross-culturally the extent to which facial expressions of surrounding people influence judgments of a target person’s emotion. Japanese children were more likely than Canadian children to judge an emotionally-neutral target as more negative (positive) when the background emotion was negative (positive), demonstrating an assimilation effect. Canadian children, however, showed a contrast effect: judging the target person’s neutral emotion as more negative when the background emotion was positive. These data extend extant understanding of emotion recognition by illuminating nuances in perceptual processes across developmental and cultural lines.
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Notes
Canadian boys (M = 4.79, SD = 0.50) rated the central person’s happy expression lower than Canadian girls (M = 5.00, SD = 0), t(39) = 2.25, p = .03, d = .72, whereas there was no gender difference in Japanese participants (boy: M = 4.90, SD = 0.30, girl: M = 4.81, SD = 0.39, t(39) = 1.17, p = .25, d = .37). The interaction effect appeared independently of the background emotion and thus it is beyond the scope of the present research.
We divided children into younger (10 Canadians and 11 Japanese) and older groups (8 Canadians and 14 Japanese) at 60 months for each culture and performed a 2 (culture) × 2 (age) × 4 (background emotion) mixed model ANOVA for the judgment of each of the central person’s emotions on the differences between the ratings given when the central person’s emotion was congruent versus incongruent with the background emotion. In the judgment of the central person’s sad emotion, an interaction between age and background emotion was marginally significant, F(2, 78) = 2.73, p = .07, η p 2 = .07. The older group (M = 0.34, SD = 0.97) judged the central person’s sad emotion as more positive when the background emotion was happy, compared to the younger group (M = −0.07, SD = 0.35), t(78) = 2.22, p = .03, d = .50. Except for this, no significant interaction including age was found.
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Acknowledgments
The research was supported by Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research 19730381 from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology of Japan. We thank Mana Izutsu, Natsuko Miwa and Yu Niiya for their support in carrying out this work.
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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.
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Keiko Ishii declares that she has no conflict of interest. Nicholas Rule declares that he has no conflict of interest. Rie Toriyama declares that she has no conflict of interest.
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Ishii, K., Rule, N.O. & Toriyama, R. Context Sensitivity in Canadian and Japanese Children’s Judgments of Emotion. Curr Psychol 36, 577–584 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-016-9446-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-016-9446-y