A Cross‐Cultural Comparison of U.S. and Japanese Trainees’ Emotion‐Recognition Ability

Abstract

This study investigated the ability of non-Hispanic White U.S. counseling psychology trainees and Japanese clinical psychology trainees to recognize facially expressed emotions. Researchers proposed that an in-group advantage for emotion recognition would occur, women would have higher emotion-recognition accuracy than men, and participants would vary in their emotion-intensity ratings. Sixty White U.S. students and 60 Japanese students viewed photographs of non-Hispanic White U.S. and Japanese individuals expressing emotions and completed a survey assessing emotion-recognition ability and emotion-intensity ratings. Two four-way mixed-factor analyses of variance were performed, examining effects of participant nationality/race, participant gender, poser nationality/race, and poser gender on emotion-recognition accuracy scores and intensity ratings. Results did not support the in-group advantage hypothesis, rather, U.S. participants had higher accuracy rates than Japanese trainees overall. No gender differences in accuracy were found. However, respondents varied in their intensity ratings across gender and nationality. Implications for training applied psychology students and for future research are presented.

A Web-Based Auditory and Visual Emotion Perception Task Experiment With Children and a Comparison of Lab Data and Web Data

“…These results are unexpected considering that previous studies have insisted on the ingroup effect in facial recognition tasks (e.g., Elfenbein and Ambady, 2002). However, more recent studies have demonstrated that Japanese raters did not show the ingroup advantage in the perception of facial expressions (Matsumoto et al, 2009;Hutchison et al, 2018). Overall, Japanese people's facial expressions may not necessarily be perceived correctly by ingroup members.…”

Color Affects Recognition of Emoticon Expressions

“…The marked impact of color on emoticons conveying negative emotions can also be related to the specific participant population in the present study, since a display of negative emotions is discouraged in the Japanese culture ( Hutchison et al, 2018 ; Matsumoto, 1992 , 2007 ; Sugimoto & Levin, 2000 ). As a consequence, the Japanese are more anxious in interpersonal contexts and are more vigilant and sensitive to signs of disapproval ( Dailey et al, 2010 ; Ishii et al, 2011 ).…”

“…These Angry–Sad and Surprised–Happy confusions may also be explained by a specific facial expression decoding strategy of Japanese observers: unlike Western viewers, whose judgments of facial expressions are dominated by the shape of the mouth, Japanese observers (and those in other Eastern cultures) are more likely to judge facial emotions from the eyes (Gedron, 2017; Hutchison et al, 2018; Jack et al, 2009; Sugimoto & Levin, 2000; Yuki et al, 2007) or eyebrows (Hasegawa & Unuma, 2010). This decoding strategy, or the “own emotional dialect” (Dailey et al, 2010, p. 875), is reflected in the design of conventional Japanese emoticons: the mouth is represented by a straight line, regardless of the conveyed emotion, whereas the emotion valence is conveyed by the eye shape, with capital lambdas standing for “happy eyes” (^_^) and capital Ts for “sad eyes” (T_T) (Park et al, 2013; Takahashi et al, 2017).…”

Impact of facemasks on psychotherapy: Clinician's confidence and emotion recognition

“…In a facial emotion recognition task, clinical psychologists performed better than psychopharmacologists (Dalkiran et al, 2017 ), suggesting that working more on relational aspects contributed to improving the ability to recognize emotions in facial expressions. In a cross‐cultural study (Hutchison et al, 2018 ), US and Japanese clinical psychology trainees were assessed in their ability to recognize facially expressed emotions. The results showed that there were no group or gender differences.…”