Cross-Cultural Emotion Recognition among Canadian Ethnic Groups

Abstract

This study aims to investigate cultural differences in recognition accuracy as well as the in-group advantage hypothesis for emotion recognition among sub-Saharan African, Chinese, and French Canadian individuals living in Canada. The participants viewed expressions of happiness, anger, sadness, fear, disgust, and shame selected from the Montreal Set of Facial Displays of Emotion. These data did not support the in-group advantage hypothesis under the condition of stimulus equivalence. However, both encoder and decoder effects were found. Specifically, French Canadians were more accurate for the decoding of expressions of shame and sadness. Moreover, fear expressions were best recognized when shown by sub-Saharan Africans, suggesting an effect of salience of expressive cues due to morphological features of the face.