Abstract

The present study put to the test the hypothesis that judging people’s emotions from facial expressions is shaped by cultural dichotomies, such as individualism and collectivism. It was motivated by the findings of research using cross-country samples, which had shown that individuals from presumed collectivistic societies interpret the facial expressions observed in a person by considering the expressions of people in the background. Conversely, individuals from presumed individualistic societies largely discard the context in which an emotion is expressed. In the present study, the participants were individuals from a society whose traditional collectivism is challenged by the individualistic themes of an economy striving toward inclusion into the global marketplace. Their mixed cultural orientation consisted of diverse levels of endorsement of individualism and collectivism. Participants viewed drawings depicting a central person who expressed anger, happiness, or sadness, surrounded by other people who displayed a different emotion or remained neutral. Their task was to rate the emotion of the main character. In this study, only the estimation of the intensity of happiness showed sensitivity to the emotional expressions in the background. Furthermore, it increased with participants’ collectivism, irrespective of whether the context was neutral or mismatched. These findings suggest that in a globalized world, cross-cultural dichotomies of human cognition may fade away while preserving some pockets of distinctiveness.