Discussion and Conclusions

Abstract

The present chapter reports the final considerations on the results of cross-cultural experiments that analyze the ability of participants from different western cultures and languages—Italian, American, French, Hungarian and Lithuanian—in inferring emotional information from audio , mute video and audiovisual emotional expressions. The emotional stimuli exploited were extracted from living recording movie scenes relating to two different cultural contexts and languages: American English (as a globally spread language ) and Italian (as a country-specific language). The goal was to explore the effect of cultures and languages on the effectiveness of dynamic visual and vocal cues in conveying emotional expressions. The main findings suggest that the processing of dynamic visual information shares more commonalities trough different close cultures, whereas the identification of vocal emotional information seems to be more affected by the language familiarity. In addition, a language cultural specificity as well as a nonlinear processing of the emotional information is hypothesized. A discussion on the recognition accuracy of some of basic emotion is also reported.