People’s Emotion Expressions Reveal Their Cultural Identification

Emotion expressions convey people’s feelings to others around them. However, emotion expressions can reveal more than just what someone is feeling. Facial expressions of emotion vary somewhat by culture: Although emotion expressions share some aspects across cultures (such as smiling to show happiness), there are differences in the details, sometimes called nonverbal accents. An example might be closed- versus open-mouth smiling. Because of this, the culturally-specific accent of an emotion expression can reveal what culture someone belongs to.

Social psychologist Abigail Marsh and her colleagues showed that people could tell whether someone was Japanese or Japanese American (in other words, which culture they belonged to) from photos of their faces. Importantly, people were most accurate when the faces in the photos showed emotion, rather than a neutral expression. The nonverbal accents showed up in their emotion expressions and revealed their culture.

In an increasingly globalized world, though, many people don’t feel that they belong to just one culture, but rather feel blended between cultures or that they identify with more than one culture. How might this affect their emotion expressions, and others’ perceptions of their cultural identification?

To answer this question, Nick Rule and I collected photos of East Asian students at the University of Toronto. For each person, we collected photos where they posed neutral, angry, and happy expressions and also asked them how much they identified with Canadian culture—meaning belief in Canadian values, participation in Canadian culture and traditions, and social connections to Canadians—as well as with their family’s heritage culture (for example, Chinese culture).

We then asked Canadian and East Asian participants to view the photos and rate how “Canadian” they thought each person was. We then looked at the relationship between the pictured individuals’ cultural identification and how “Canadian” other people thought they were.

Looking “Canadian”

People could tell how Canadian someone’s self-identity was just from looking at their faces—that is, the judgments of how Canadian each person looked correlated with their self-reported cultural identification. Individuals who identified more with Canadian culture (and less with their East Asian heritage culture) looked more Canadian to the viewers. This was especially the case for the happy expressions.

This indicated that nonverbal accents in posed happy expressions helped reveal individuals’ degree of identification with Canadian culture. What exactly might this accent be? North American and East Asian cultures differ in whether they value more excited or calm happiness, so we tested whether this cultural difference might be reflected in the intensity of the happy expressions.

To test this, we asked a new group of participants to rate the posed happy faces on how happy they looked. We found that the intensity of the happiness expressions helped explain people’s ability to detect individuals’ cultural identification. Individuals who identified more with Canadian culture (and less with their heritage culture) put on more intensely happy expressions, and individuals showing more intensely happy expressions were judged as more Canadian. These cultural accents in emotion expression therefore aligned with different cultural ideals of excited versus calm happiness, thereby revealing individuals’ degree of cultural identification.

Thus, a person’s cultural identification is revealed through nonverbal accents in emotion expression. This indicates that how people express their emotions shifts as their cultural identification changes—which can occur after spending more time in a country, for example. This parallels earlier research findings showing that people’s cultural exposure affects their accuracy in reading emotion expressions from different cultures. Altogether, this adds to understanding of how cultural experience and exposure can change people and suggests that these changes are visible to others through emotion expressions.

For Further Reading

Bjornsdottir, R. T., & Rule, N. O. (2021). Perceiving acculturation from neutral and emotional faces. Emotion, 21(4), 720–729. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0000735
 

R. Thora Bjornsdottir is a Lecturer/Assistant Professor in the Psychology Department at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her research focuses on first impressions from faces, including impressions of people’s social group memberships (such as social class, sexual orientation, and culture).