Comparison of emotion perception among different cultures

Abstract

In this study, we conducted a comparative experiment on emotion perception among different cultures. Emotional components were perceived by subjects from Japan, the United States and China, all of whom had no experience living abroad. An emotional speech database without linguistic information was used in this study and evaluated using three- and/or six-emotional dimensions. Principal component analysis (PCA) indicates that the common factors could explain about 60% variance of the data among the three cultures by using a three-emotion description and about 50% variance between Japanese and Chinese cultures by using a six-emotion description. The effects of the emotion categories on perception results were investigated. The emotions of anger, joy and sadness (group 1) have consistent structures in PCA-based spaces when switching from threeemotion categories to six-emotion categories. Disgust, surprise, and fear (group 2) appeared as paired counterparts of anger, joy and sadness, respectively. When investigating the subspaces constructed by these two groups, the similarity between the two emotion groups was found to be fairly high in the two-dimensional space. The similarity becomes lower in 3- or higher dimensional spaces, but not significantly different. The results from this study suggest that a wide range of human emotions might fall into a small subspace of basic emotions. © 2010 The Acoustical Society of Japan.