Emotions and Culture

As you might expect (after reading about the components of emotion), people tend to respond similarly in terms of physiological (or bodily) expression. Also, our ability to recognize and produce facial expressions of emotion appears to be universal. Research conducted with individuals born blind at birth found that the same facial expression of emotions were produced (smiling when happy, frowning when sad), despite these individuals never having the opportunity to observe these facial displays of emotion in other people. This suggests that facial muscles movements involved in generating emotional expressions is universal and not the result of learned behavior. Charles Darwin’s book The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) very similar morphology in the facial expressions of non-human primates like chimpanzees and orangutans to human facial expressions. In fact, there is substantial evidence for seven universal emotions that are each associated with distinct facial expressions. These include: happiness, surprise, sadness, fright, disgust, contempt, and anger (Ekman & Keltner, 1997).

Ekman and Friesen (1972) conducted one of the first scientific studies of emotion which raised important questions about the role of culture in shaping universal components of emotion. Ekman and Friesen then took photos of people posing with these different expressions (Figure 1). With the help of colleagues at different universities around the world, Ekman and Friesen showed these pictures to members of vastly different cultures, gave them a list of emotion words (translated into the relevant languages) and asked them to match the facial expressions in the photos with their corresponding emotion words on the list (Ekman & Friesen, 1971; Ekman et al., 1987).

Across cultures, participants matched each picture to the same emotion word at levels greater than chance. This led Ekman and his colleagues to conclude that there are universally recognized emotional facial expressions.

• Happiness
• Surprise
• Sadness
• Fright
• Disgust
• Contempt
• Anger (Ekman & Keltner, 1997).

At the same time, Ekman and Friesen found considerable variability across cultures in recognition rates. For instance, 95% of participants in the United States associated a smile with happiness, only 69% of Sumatran participants made the same association. Similarly, 86% of participants in the United States associated wrinkling of the nose with disgust, but only 60% of Japanese made the same association with a wrinkled nose (Ekman et al., 1987). Ekman and colleagues interpreted this variation as demonstrating cultural differences in the way that people show or display emotion (Ekman, 1972).