Cross-Cultural Effects On Ensemble Coding Of Emotion In Facial Crowds

Abstract

In many social situations, we make a snap judgment about crowds of people relying on their overall mood (termed \"crowd emotion\"). Although reading crowd emotion is critical for interpersonal dynamics, the sociocultural aspects of this process have not been explored. The current study examined how culture modulates the processing of crowd emotion in Korean and American observers. Korean and American participants were briefly presented with two groups of faces that were individually varying in emotional expressions and asked to choose which group between the two they would rather avoid. We found that Korean participants were more accurate than American participants overall, in line with the framework on cultural viewpoints: Holistic versus analytic processing in East Asians versus Westerners. Moreover, we found a speed advantage for other-race crowds in both cultural groups. Finally, we found different hemispheric lateralization patterns: American participants were more accurate for angry crowds presented in the left visual field and happy crowds presented in the right visual field, replicating previous studies, whereas Korean participants did not show an interaction between emotional valence and visual field. This work suggests that culture plays a role in modulating our crowd emotion perception of groups of faces and responses to them.