Abstract
We assessed the impact of social context on the judgment of emotional facial expressions as a function of self-construal and decoding rules. German and Greek participants rated spontaneous emotional faces shown either alone or surrounded by other faces with congruent or incongruent facial expressions. Greek participants were higher in interdependence than German participants. In line with cultural decoding rules, Greek participants rated anger expressions less intensely and sad and disgust expressions more intensely. Social context affected the ratings by both groups in different ways. In the more interdependent culture (Greece) participants perceived anger least intensely when the group showed neutral expressions, whereas sadness expressions were rated as most intense in the absence of social context. In the independent culture (Germany) a group context (others expressing anger or happiness) additionally amplified the perception of angry and happy expressions. In line with the notion that these effects are mediated by more holistic processing linked to higher interdependence, this difference disappeared when we controlled for interdependence on the individual level. The findings confirm the usefulness of considering both country level and individual level factors when studying cultural differences.
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Notes
Each presentation was interrupted 12 times with a short emotion contagion questionnaire. These were presented in an equal probability manner for every order. These data will not be discussed in the present context.
Participants further completed the Emotion perception subscale of the Mayer Salovey and Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test 2.0; the Situational Test of Emotion Management for the judgment of different emotional situations; the Wong and Law (Trait) Emotional Intelligence Scale; the Toronto Alexithymia Scale; the 10-item version of the Big Five Inventory; the Experiences in Close Relationships Scale—revised, a global attachment scale; the item: "How satisfied are you with your life; the Positive and Negative Affect Scale; the Rosenberg Self-esteem Scale; the 3-item Loneliness and a Psychological Well-being Scale.
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Acknowledgments
We would like to thank H. Mauersberger, C.-L. Kessler, D. Kokorikou, and D. Makri, for help with data collection. The research was supported by Grant 50774769 from the PPP Program of the IKY-DAAD program to Kafetsios and Hess.
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Hess, U., Blaison, C. & Kafetsios, K. Judging Facial Emotion Expressions in Context: The Influence of Culture and Self-Construal Orientation. J Nonverbal Behav 40, 55–64 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10919-015-0223-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10919-015-0223-7