Abstract
We report data concerning cross-cultural judgments of emotion in spontaneously produced facial expressions. Americans, Japanese, British, and International Students in the US reliably attributed emotions to the expressions of Olympic judo athletes at the end of a match for a medal, and at two times during the subsequent medal ceremonies. There were some observer culture differences in absolute attribution agreement rates, but high cross-cultural agreement in differences in attribution rates across expressions (relative agreement rates). Moreover, we operationalized signal clarity and demonstrated that it was associated with agreement rates similarly in all cultures. Finally, we obtained judgments of won-lost match outcomes and medal finish, and demonstrated that the emotion judgments were associated with accuracy in judgments of outcomes. These findings demonstrated that members of different cultures reliably judge spontaneously expressed emotions, and that across observer cultures, lower absolute agreement rates are related to noise produced by non-emotional facial behaviors. Also, the findings suggested that observers of different cultures utilize the same facial cues when judging emotions, and that the signal value of facial expressions is similar across cultures.
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Notes
Readers should interpret the current results vis-à-vis the definition of spontaneity adopted in this article. Future work should examine different definitions of spontaneity, which may provide differing results, and we encourage such work. Regardless, the expressions judged in this study were produced under very different conditions than the posed, voluntary expressions examined in all cross-cultural studies to date.
Olympic judo competition occurs in an elimination tournament system, where the winner of the final match is the gold medalist, and the loser obtains the silver. There are two consolation bracket matches in which both winners receive a bronze medal; thus there are two bronze medals awarded, and two 5th placers (no medal). There is no 4th place in Olympic judo competition.
Of all expressions at match completion, only 7 included profile views, in which half the face was visible but the other half was not. None of medal ceremonies expressions were profile views.
Multiple photographs of each athlete were taken at both match completion and medal ceremonies, allowing for the identification of expressions at apex. In any expression involving multiple facial muscles, the muscles often have different timing dynamics, and thus apex at slightly different times. We selected for coding and analysis the expressions in which the appearance of the total muscle configurations appeared to be at its highest intensity.
The specific AUs and AU combinations on which FACS bases its emotion predictions have been published and are available for public scrutiny. These AUs and AU combinations typically involve components of full-face, prototypic expressions, and have been associated with emotion signaling in a wide range of studies involving actual expression production by participants from all parts of the world, not just Westerners (Matsumoto et al. 2008), ensuring that the facial configurations predicted to be associated with emotion are not just “western” prototypes.
For the purpose of this review, we consider only those studies involving adult expressions. There have been studies involving judgments of spontaneous expressions of infants (Camras et al. 2006; Yik et al. 1998); but debates concerning when expressions emerge in development (Izard et al. 1995; Oster 2005) render these data incomparable to adult data.
For example, people raise their brows to illustrate their speech, often animating the verbal contents. Raised brows are also components of surprise or fear.
Likewise, the expressions utilized in Naab and Russell (2007) had similar limitations. Thus, their data are more aptly considered emotion attributions, not recognition.
Participants were requested to report their unique, Sona-generated participant ID to participate in the study. In order to obtain such an ID, participants had to register as a participant. All participants in the study were associated with a unique ID. It is possible that individuals could pose as multiple people, obtain multiple IDs and gain multiple access, but highly unlikely.
This operationalization of signal clarity is based on the degree to which facial configurations match the prototypical expression configurations empirically demonstrated to be produced by people of many different cultures (Matsumoto et al. 2008) and universally recognized by observers in many different cultures (Elfenbein and Ambady 2002; Matsumoto 2001). As such, it is not an operationalization according to “western” expressive prototypes. Regardless, as this is the first such operationalization to our knowledge in the literature, we encourage the development of other definitions and operations of this important concept in the study of nonverbal behavior. For example, our current definition does not incorporate angle of observation, or the degree of face covering because of clothing, jewelry, or other such artifacts. Such work should be done in the future.
This occurred when the expression contained critical AUs associated with two emotions simultaneously.
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Acknowledgments
We thank Joanne Chung, Camelotte Pengosro, Hyi-Sung Hwang, Kathleen Rives, Jessie Wilson, and Jessica Clifton for their assistance in the general laboratory program.
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Matsumoto, D., Olide, A., Schug, J. et al. Cross-Cultural Judgments of Spontaneous Facial Expressions of Emotion. J Nonverbal Behav 33, 213–238 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10919-009-0071-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10919-009-0071-4