A cross-cultural study on the perception of emotions: How Hungarian subjects evaluate American and Italian emotional expressions

Abstract

In the present work a cross-modal evaluation of the visual and auditory channels in conveying emotional information is conducted through perceptual experiments aimed at investigating whether some of the basic emotions are perceptually privileged and whether the perceptual mode, the cultural environment and the language play a role in this preference. To this aim, Hungarian subjects were requested to assess emotional stimuli extracted from Italian and American movies in the single (either mute video or audio alone) and combined audio-video mode. Results showed that among the proposed emotions, anger plays a special role and fear, happiness and sadness are better perceived than surprise and irony in both the cultural environments. The perception of emotions is affected by the communication mode and the language influences the perceptual assessment of emotional information. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.