Do People Agree on How Positive Emotions Are Expressed? A Survey of Four Emotions and Five Modalities Across 11 Cultures

Abstract

While much is known about how negative emotions are expressed in different modalities, our understanding of the nonverbal expressions of positive emotions remains limited. In the present research, we draw upon disparate lines of theoretical and empirical work on positive emotions, and systematically examine which channels are thought to be used for expressing four positive emotions: feeling moved, gratitude, interest, and triumph. Employing the intersubjective approach, an established method in cross-cultural psychology, we first explored how the four positive emotions were reported to be expressed in two North American community samples (Studies 1a and 1b: n = 1466). We next confirmed the cross-cultural generalizability of our findings by surveying respondents from ten countries that diverged on cultural values (Study 2: n = 1826). Feeling moved was thought to be signaled with facial expressions, gratitude with the use of words, interest with words, face and voice, and triumph with body posture, vocal cues, facial expressions, and words. These findings provide cross-culturally consistent findings of differential expressions across positive emotions. Notably, positive emotions were thought to be expressed via modalities that go beyond the face.

Comparing gratitude and pride: evidence from brain and behavior

“…Gratitude has few nonverbal expressions. It is mainly expressed verballywith words (75.0%) and voice (64.8%), compared with face, body, and touch (37.0-55.3%) (Manokara et al, 2021). In line with this, an experimental study failed to find any distinctive facial expression for gratitude (Campos et al, 2013).…”

Putting the affect into affective polarisation

“…The same is true for research on affect (e.g. Manokara et al, 2021 ; Sun et al, 2023 ). It would require large cross-context studies to investigate if and to what extent the interplay between social identities and affect have different dynamics depending on the contexts.…”

(Not) showing you feel good, can be bad: The consequences of breaking expressivity norms for positive emotions

“…When selecting a cultural context to situate our experiments in, we were guided by the availability of past research that would help inform our predictions. Although scholarship on positive emotional expressions (e.g., Manokara et al, 2021) and social norm violations (e.g., Stamkou et al, 2019) have tried to incorporate samples from multiple cultures, most of this work remains predominantly US-centric. Therefore, to demonstrate that positive emotional expressions can have negative social consequences, we chose to center our work in the cultural context of the US.…”

“…The first criterion was that there should exist some amount of consensus as to what constitutes the expressive behavior of that emotion. Group members would need to accurately classify a behavior first before making any social judgment about transgression, meaning that our target emotions should be identifiable based on expressive behaviors (see Cordaro et al, 2020;Manokara et al, 2021). Secondly, we aimed to select emotions that are defined as positive in terms of experienced valence, such that the subjective state of feeling these emotions would be typically deemed pleasant.…”