Basic emotion method used on non-Western samples

From How Emotions Are Made
Jump to navigation Jump to search

Chapter 3 endnote 5, from How Emotions are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett.
Some context is:

In cultures that are less like the United States, such as Japan, Malaysia, Ethiopia, China, Sumatra, and Turkey, subjects match faces and words slightly less well, responding as expected about 72 percent of the time.

These values were slightly higher than those reported in a meta-analysis on the universality and cross-cultural specificity of emotion perception published in 2002 by social psychologists Hillary Elfenbein and Nalini Ambady. They compiled 87 articles using over 22,000 test subjects sampled from countries all over the world. They report an average agreement rate at just below 80% when test subjects are categorizing photographs of anger, sadness, fear, disgust, happiness, and surprise faces that are posed by members of their own culture, and an average of 68% when test subjects are categorizing photographs of people from other cultures.[1] This “in-group” advantage occurs because people have more experience with the structural features of faces from their own culture and develop relatively greater perceptual expertise with those faces.


Notes on the Notes

  1. Elfenbein, Hillary Anger, and Nalini Ambady. 2002. “On the Universality and Cultural Specificity of Emotion Recognition: A Meta-Analysis.” Psychological Bulletin 128 (2): 203–235.