Cultural variation in hemifacial asymmetry of emotion expressions

Abstract

Photographs of hemifacial composites (left-left, right-right and normal presentation, right-left) of these cultures (Japanese, Oriental Indian and North American) displaying six emotions (happy, sad, fear, anger, surprise, disgust) and a neutral state were administered successively (one by one) as well as simultaneously (three hemifacial photographs of an expression at a time) to observers for judgment on a 5-point scale in terms of distinctiveness of expression. Observers' judgments were treated with a culture of expressor x sex of expressor x facial presentation x emotion category mixed factorial ANOVA. Cultures did not vary for their distinctiveness of facial expressions, suggesting universality in this respect. Culture-specificity was, however, observed with respect to hemifacial asymmetry and valence of emotion expressions: (1) Japanese showed a right hemifacial bias for positive and left hemifacial bias for negative emotions; Indians and North Americans showed left hemifacial bias for all emotions, and (2) negative emotion expressions were least distinctly identifiable in Japanese faces followed by Indian and North American faces.

Hemifacial differences in the in‐group advantage in emotion recognition

“…For example, Mandal, Harizuka, Bhushan, and Mishra (2001) used hemispheric differences to test for cultural differences in emotional expressions. The current article uses hemifacial differences in order to test possible explanations for the in-group advantage.…”

The NimStim set of facial expressions: Judgments from untrained research participants

“…For example, the JACFEE set (Ekman and Matsumoto, 1993–2004) consists of Japanese and Caucasian models, Mandal’s (1987) set consists of Indian models, Mandal et al’s (2001) set consists of Japanese models, the Montreal Set of Facial Displays of Emotion (Beaupre et al, 2000) consists of French Canadian, Chinese, and sub-Saharan African models, and Wang and Markham’s (1999) set consists of Chinese models. Unlike these other sets, the NimStim set provides one uniform set of Asian-American, African-American, European-American, and Latino-American actors, all photographed under identical conditions.…”

“…First, the NimStim set is available in color, and it contains a large number of stimuli and a large variety of facial expressions. Whereas most sets contain roughly 100 or fewer stimuli (Mandal, 1987; Ekman and Matsumoto, 1993–2004; Wang and Markham, 1999; Mandal et al, 2001), the NimStim set contains 672, consisting of 43 professional actors, each modeling 16 different facial poses, including different examples of happy, sad, disgusted, fearful, angry, surprised, neutral, and calm. Secondly, a neutral expression is included in this set.…”

“…Secondly, a neutral expression is included in this set. The neutral expression is sometimes included in other facial expression sets (Ekman and Friesen, 1976; Erwin et al,1992; Ekman and Matsumoto, 1993–2004), but is often omitted, particularly in sets that include models from different racial and ethnic backgrounds (Mandal, 1987; Wang and Markham, 1999; Beaupre et al, 2000; Mandal et al, 2001). The inclusion of the neutral expression is important since neutral is often a comparison condition, particularly in neuroimaging studies (Breiter et al, 1996; Thomas et al, 2001).…”

The MR2: A multi-racial, mega-resolution database of facial stimuli

“…Sets tend to comprise a single race (Mandal, 1987;Lundqvist et al, 1998;Wang & Markham, 1999;Mandal et al, 2001;Ebner et al, 2010) or just two (Ekman & Matsumoto, 1993;Ma et al, 2015), or a single gender (Eberhardt et al, 2006). Those databases that do contain a mix of races may not have more than one or two stimuli within a single race/sex category (Barrett & Bliss-Moreau, 2009).…”