What is this article about?

In contemporary times, there is no debate about the universality of facial expressions and cultural differences in the expression of emotions are also well accepted. One study included American and Japanese individuals who watched a stressful movie in two conditions. In the first condition, they were all alone and the Americans and Japanese expressed the same facial display of disgust, fear and distress. In the second condition, the experimenter was also in the room. The American individuals expressed their emotions, but the Japanese didn’t because in their culture, it is not appropriate to show these negative feelings in a public situation. The differences between these display rules are explained by the neuro-cultural theory of emotion. According to this theory, everybody has an innate system which stores the universal emotions and the cultural display rules. These rules are learned. There are, however, no studies that examine display rules across cultures. One of the reasons for this is that there is no real conceptualization of culture. Culture arises from shared behaviors, beliefs, values and attitudes communicated from generation to generation. There have to be meaningful dimensions to determine difference between cultures. According to the author of this article (Matsumoto), the dimensions of ‘individualism-collectivism’ and ‘power distance’ can be used to make predictions about the differences of cultures.

Individualistic – collectivistic cultures

Individualistic cultures encourage individuals to be unique and hierarchical power is minimized. In contrast, collectivistic cultures emphasizes the group and not uniqueness, and hierarchical differences are emphasized. The individualistic-collectivistic differences go along with the ingroup-outgroup theory. Displaying certain emotions depends on the people you are surrounded with. People are more willing to display emotions to ingroup members than to the outgroup members. Individualistic cultures have more ingroups, and because of that, members don’t really feel attached to the groups. In collective cultures, ingroups are really important. Members feel bonded with the other members and they try to fit into the group. Being different can be punished. They also really want their group to be harmonious. Individualistic cultures will also discriminate less to outgroup members than in collectivistic cultures. People of collectivistic cultures display more positive emotions to members of the ingroup and more negative emotions to members of the outgroup, while people of individualistic cultures display more negative emotions to members of the ingroup and more positive emotions to members of the outgroup. This is because the two different cultures want to keep the harmony between ingroups and outgroups.

Power Distance

Power distance refers to cultural differences in power, status and hierarchy. Ingroup members and outgroup members can both include people of higher and people of lower status than oneself. Members in high Power Distance cultures will display more positive emotions to members of higher status and more negative emotions to members of lower status.

Members in low Power Distance cultures will display more negative emotions to others of higher status and more positive emotions to others of lower status. The display of positive emotion in high Power Distance cultures to people of higher status has the goal to maintain one’s lower status in relation to the other. The display of more negative emotion to people of lower status serves to maintain one’s higher status in relation to the other. But, in low high Power Distance cultures, it is not important to maintain status differences and people with lower status can display more negative emotions to people of higher status. If any of these rules are violated, the degree of power distance could be threatened.

What experiment is used in this study?

This study involved American and Japanese participants. Research shows that America is more individualistic than Japan and that Japan scores higher on Power Distance than America. So, Japan is a country that emphasizes status and position differences, while the United States tries to minimize perceived status and power differences among people.

In this study, the participants watched universal facial expressions of emotion and had to rate whether it was appropriate to display these emotions in certain social situations. In the second session, participants were shown more facial expressions and had to judge which emotion was portrayed and had to rate the intensity of the emotion. The following hypotheses were tested:

• Japanese people would rate negative emotions in outgroup situations more appropriate than Americans and Japanese people would rate positive emotions in ingroup situations more appropriate than Americans
• Americans would rate negative emotions in ingroup situations more appropriate than Japanese people and they would rate positive emotion in outgroup situations more appropriate than Japanese people
• The Japanese would rate negative emotions with lower status people more appropriate than Americans and they would rate positive emotions in higher status people more appropriate than Americans
• Americans would rate negative emotions in higher status people more appropriate than Japanese people and they would rate positive emotions in lower status people more appropriate than Japanese people

The American participants were born and raised in America and they didn’t have any Asian family members. The Japanese subjects were all born and raised in Japan. All subjects were students at major universities in large areas.

The emotions displayed on the pictures were anger, disgust, happiness, sadness, fear and surprise. The pictures involved Japanese and American males and females. The Americans got to see pictures of Americans and the Japanese of Japanese. The reason behind this is that if the Japanese would see the pictures of the Americans they would know that they are foreign, but if the Americans saw the pictures of the Japanese they might think that they are American.

The subjects rated the appropriateness of every emotion in eight different situations: in public, with close friends, with family members, with acquaintances, with people of higher status, with people of lower status and with children. They had to rate the appropriateness of displaying these emotions on a nine-point scale.

The second part of the study was conducted two weeks after the first one. In that study, participants got to view 99 photos, of which 24 photos were used in the first part of the study. These pictures did include people from different cultures, so not only Americans and Japanese people. The participants had to judge which emotion was displayed and had to rate, on a 9-point scale, how intense the emotion were.

What are the results?

The data showed that Americans rated disgust and sadness in ingroups as more appropriate than the Japanese did, and they also rated happiness in public more appropriate than the Japanese did. The Japanese subjects rated anger more appropriate in outgroups and to others who have a lower status. This is in line with the hypothesis of the researchers. The reason for the higher rating of appropriateness in ingroups for Americans is that America is more tolerant of negative emotions in ingroups and they don’t really worry about the harmony of the group. The reason for Japanese people to find anger more appropriate for outgroups is because the Japanese cultures differentiates between ingroups and outgroups as a way to maintain the harmony in one’s group.

Japanese people rated negative emotions towards lower status people as more appropriate, because they maintain power distance relationships, while Americans didn’t rate negative emotions towards lower status people as appropriate, because this would emphasize differences and this is in contradiction to the American culture of equality.

Although a lot of researchers use the distinction between individualistic- collectivistic cultures and Power Distance, there are also other possible distinctions that should be studied. Maybe there are other distinctions that are more useful to describe the differences in emotion display between cultures. Another remark is that researchers should also study spontaneous emotion displays. The Japanese people might show other behaviors than what they actually wrote down. Also, it might be better for the results if the people were asked about what emotion they would have displayed if they felt a certain emotion. Instead, in this study, they judged the appropriateness, maybe they would have displayed another emotion.