Are you looking at me? The influence of facial orientation and cultural focus salience on the perception of emotion expressions

Abstract

We examined the influence of cultural orientation salience on the emotion perception process in a contextualized emotion recognition task. We primed individual and collective focus in participants who later rated the emotion expressions of a central character (target) showing a happy, sad, angry, or neutral facial expression in a group setting. Facial orientation of a group of four other persons towards the target person was manipulated so that they faced either “inwards,” towards the central character, or “outwards,” towards the observer. Priming a collectivistic mind-set resulted in the perception of more intense emotions in the “inwards” facial orientation condition when the target showed angry, happy, or neutral expressions. Individualist focus influenced emotion perception in the “outwards” facial orientation condition in few cases. The findings highlight the significance of perceivers’ cultural orientation and social elements of the situation for emotion perception in line with the “culture as situated cognition” model.