“There Is No Face Like Home”: Ratings for Cultural Familiarity to Own and Other Facial Dialects of Emotion With and Without Conscious Awareness in a British Sample

Abstract

The dialects theory of cross-cultural communication suggests that due to culture-specific characteristics in the expression of emotion, we can recognise own-culture emotional expressions more accurately than other-culture emotional expressions. This effect is suggested to occur due to the nonconvergent social evolution that takes place in different geographical regions. Based on the evolutionary value of own-culture social signals, previous research has suggested that own-culture emotional expressions can be appraised without conscious awareness. The current study tested this hypothesis. We developed, validated, and made open access what is to our knowledge the first labelled, multicultural facial stimuli set, including freely expressed and Facial Action Coding System instructed emotional expressions. We assessed emotional recognition and cultural familiarity responses during brief backward-masked presentations in British participants. We found that emotional recognition and cultural familiarity were higher for own-culture faces. A Bayesian analysis of face-detection and emotional-recognition performance revealed that faces were not processed subliminally. Further analysis of awareness, using hits (correct detection/recognition) and misses (incorrect detection/recognition), showed that face-detection hits were a necessary condition for reporting higher familiarity for own-culture faces. These findings suggest that the own-culture emotional recognition advantage is preserved under conditions of backwards masking and that the appraisal of cultural familiarity involves conscious awareness.

Cross-cultural effects on graphical password memorability and design

“…During this study, two important hypotheses were tested in relation to password memorability: the effect of selected images from one’s own culture, and the cultural influence on the decay of password memorability. This study found that selecting images based on cultural familiarity improves a password’s memorability, such observation in compliance with (Tsikandilakis et al , 2019). Cultural designs that rely on such images may improve users’ cognition and memorization of the password.…”

“…To address this issue and its influence on graphical password effectiveness, this study examines the central research question: Does selecting images based on cultural familiarity improve the memorability of the password over time? “Cultural familiarity” refers to the conscious awareness of other cultures (Tsikandilakis et al , 2019).…”

“The Harder One Tries …”: Findings and Insights From the Application of Covert Response Pressure Assessment Technology in Three Studies of Visual Perception

“…Results and Discussion: Confidence, Click Pressure, Release Time, and Subliminality Signal detection analysis for faces presented for 13.89 ms revealed a trend for Bayesian evidence for the null-that detection performance was within a priori defined criteria for chance-level performance-suggesting that these stimuli could have been processed subliminally (M ¼ 0.5113, SD ¼ 0.0436, SE ¼ 0.0063, B ¼ 0.39). To explore responses to subliminal emotional faces and also whether the current technology could be used for the physiological assessment of subliminal emotion, we used the analysis model for the assessment of subliminality described in previous publications Tsikandilakis et al, , 2019bTsikandilakis et al, , 2019cTsikandilakis et al, , 2019dTsikandilakis, Kausel, et al, 2019). To explore whether was calculated for mean differences to the average condition mean and standard error for that condition (see Table 3) to test evidence for the null (B < 0.33; Dienes, 2014Dienes, , 2016.…”

“There Is No (Where a) Face Like Home”: Recognition and Appraisal Responses to Masked Facial Dialects of Emotion in Four Different National Cultures

“…In a previous publication we contested this notion (Tsikandilakis, Kausel, Boncompte, et al, 2019; see also Amihai et al, 2011). We created and validated a facial dataset with freely-expressed and Facial Action Units Coding System (FACS; Ekman et al, 2002) instructed emotional expression using actors from Britain, Chile, New Zealand and Singapore (Tsikandilakis, Kausel, Boncompte, et al, 2019, pp.…”

“…These findings suggested that a single glimpse could be sufficient to allow us to evaluate whether a face and/or emotional expression originated from our own cultural background. It also suggested that conscious perception and meta-awareness, such as reporting seeing a presented masked face during a post-trial task (see Bargh and Morsella, 2008), were involved in the appraisal of cultural dialects of emotion (see also Tsikandilakis, Kausel, Boncompte, et al, 2019).…”