Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
Searching for happiness across cultures. / Damjanovic, Ljubica; Roberson, Debi; Athanasopoulos, Panos et al.
In: Journal of Cognition and Culture, Vol. 10, No. 1, 2010, p. 85-107.Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
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TY - JOUR
T1 - Searching for happiness across cultures
AU - Damjanovic, Ljubica
AU - Roberson, Debi
AU - Athanasopoulos, Panos
AU - Kasai, Chise
AU - Dyson, Matthew
PY - 2010
Y1 - 2010
N2 - Three experiments examined the cultural relativity of emotion recognition using the visual search task. Caucasian-English and Japanese participants were required to search for an angry or happy discrepant face target against an array of competing distractor faces. Both cultural groups performed the task with displays that consisted of Caucasian and Japanese faces in order to investigate the effects of racial congruence on emotion detection performance. Under high perceptual load conditions, both cultural groups detected the happy face more efficiently than the angry face. When perceptual load was reduced such that target detection could be achieved by feature-matching, the English group continued to show a happiness advantage in search performance that was more strongly pronounced for other race faces. Japanese participants showed search time equivalence for happy and angry targets. Experiment 3 encouraged participants to adopt a perceptual based strategy for target detection by removing the term 'emotion' from the instructions. Whilst this manipulation did not alter the happiness advantage displayed by our English group, it reinstated it for our Japanese group, who showed a detection advantage for happiness only for other race faces. The results demonstrate cultural and linguistic modifiers on the perceptual saliency of the emotional signal and provide new converging evidence from cognitive psychology for the interactionist perspective on emotional expression recognition.
AB - Three experiments examined the cultural relativity of emotion recognition using the visual search task. Caucasian-English and Japanese participants were required to search for an angry or happy discrepant face target against an array of competing distractor faces. Both cultural groups performed the task with displays that consisted of Caucasian and Japanese faces in order to investigate the effects of racial congruence on emotion detection performance. Under high perceptual load conditions, both cultural groups detected the happy face more efficiently than the angry face. When perceptual load was reduced such that target detection could be achieved by feature-matching, the English group continued to show a happiness advantage in search performance that was more strongly pronounced for other race faces. Japanese participants showed search time equivalence for happy and angry targets. Experiment 3 encouraged participants to adopt a perceptual based strategy for target detection by removing the term 'emotion' from the instructions. Whilst this manipulation did not alter the happiness advantage displayed by our English group, it reinstated it for our Japanese group, who showed a detection advantage for happiness only for other race faces. The results demonstrate cultural and linguistic modifiers on the perceptual saliency of the emotional signal and provide new converging evidence from cognitive psychology for the interactionist perspective on emotional expression recognition.
KW - Happiness advatnage
KW - Language
KW - Emotion
KW - Culture
KW - Visual search
U2 - 10.1163/156853710X497185
DO - 10.1163/156853710X497185
M3 - Journal article
VL - 10
SP - 85
EP - 107
JO - Journal of Cognition and Culture
JF - Journal of Cognition and Culture
SN - 1567-7095
IS - 1
ER -