The question whether body movements and body postures are indicative of speci®c emotions is a matter of debate. While some studies have found evidence for speci®c body movements accompanying speci®c emotions, others indicate that movement behavior (aside from facial expression) may be only indicative of the quantity (intensity) of emotion, but not of its quality. The study reported here is an attempt to demonstrate that body movements and postures to some degree are speci®c for certain emotions. A sample of 224 video takes, in which actors and actresses portrayed the emotions of elated joy, happiness, sadness, despair, fear, terror, cold anger, hot anger, disgust, contempt, shame, guilt, pride, and boredom via a scenario approach, was analyzed using coding schemata for the analysis of body movements and postures. Results indicate that some emotion-speci®c movement and posture characteristics seem to exist, but that for body movements dierences between emotions can be partly explained by the dimension of activation. While encoder (actor) dierences are rather pronounced with respect to speci®c movement and posture habits, these dierences are largely independent from the emotion-speci®c dierences found. The results are discussed with respect to emotionspeci®c discrete expression models in contrast to dimensional models of emotion encoding. #

The major controversy concerning psychobiological universality of differential emotion patterning versus cultural relativity of emotional experience is briefly reviewed. Data from a series of cross-cultural questionnaire studies in 37 countries on 5 continents are reported and used to evaluate the respective claims of the proponents in the debate. Results show highly significant main effects and strong effect sizes for the response differences across 7 major emotions (joy, fear, anger, sadness, disgust, shame, and guilt). Profiles of cross-culturally stable differences among the emotions with respect to subjective feeling, physiological symptoms, and expressive behavior are also reported. The empirical evidence is interpreted as supporting theories that postulate both a high degree of universality of differential emotion patterning and important cultural differences in emotion elicitation, regulation, symbolic representation, and social sharing.

JOURNAL OF CROSS-CULTURAL PSYCHOLOGY Scherer et al. / VOCAL EMOTION EXPRESSION Whereas the perception of emotion from facial expression has been extensively studied cross-culturally, little is known about judges' ability to infer emotion from vocal cues. This article reports the results from a study conducted in nine countries in Europe, the United States, and Asia on vocal emotion portrayals of anger, sadness, fear, joy, and neutral voice as produced by professional German actors. Data show an overall accuracy of 66% across all emotions and countries. Although accuracy was substantially better than chance, there were sizable differences ranging from 74% in Germany to 52% in Indonesia. However, patterns of confusion were very similar across all countries. These data suggest the existence of similar inference rules from vocal expression across cultures. Generally, accuracy decreased with increasing language dissimilarity from German in spite of the use of language-free speech samples. It is concluded that culture-and language-specific paralinguistic patterns may influence the decoding process.

Decoding I This research examines the correspondence between theoretical predictions on vocal expression patterns in naturally occurring emotions (as based on the component process theory of emotion; Scherer, 1986) Research on the vocal expression of emotion lags significantly behind the study of facial affect expression. The reasons for this relative neglect are manifold (see Scherer, 1982Scherer, , 1986, for a detailed discussion of this problem). One of the most important factors is the difficulty of obtaining 1This research was supported by a grant from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (Sehe 156/8-5). The authors acknowledge collaboration of Westdeutscher Rundfunk, Cologne, in producing professional versions of actor emotion portrayals, and thank