Searching for Happiness Across Cultures

Damjanovic, Ljubica; Roberson, Debi; Athanasopoulos, Panos; Kasai, Chise; Dyson, Matthew · 2010 · Crossref

DOI: 10.1163/156853710x497185

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Summary

This study investigates the "face-in-the-crowd" effect, examining whether attention is preferentially drawn to happy or angry facial expressions across different cultures. While previous research established a "threat-superiority effect" where angry faces are detected faster, this advantage often relied on schematic faces or identical distractors. The authors sought to determine if this effect persists under more ecologically valid conditions using photographic stimuli and whether cultural factors modulate attentional deployment in English and Japanese participants. The research comprised three experiments using visual search tasks with native English and Japanese participants. Experiment 1 utilized displays of four different individuals (mixed identity) to simulate a realistic crowd. Participants identified whether all faces showed the same emotion or if one differed. Experiment 2 used displays of the same individual posing different expressions (same identity) to reduce perceptual load and potentially elicit a threat-superiority effect. Experiment 3 modified instructions to test the influence of top-down processing strategies. Stimuli were drawn from the Matsumoto and Ekman database, ensuring matched emotional intensity across Caucasian and Japanese faces. In Experiment 1, both cultural groups demonstrated a significant search advantage for happy targets over angry ones, regardless of the ethnicity of the faces in the display. This advantage was driven by slower and less accurate detection of angry faces when surrounded by neutral distractors, whereas happy faces were detected rapidly due to the distinctiveness of the smile. In Experiment 2, using same-identity displays, English participants maintained the search advantage for happy faces. However, Japanese participants showed no significant difference in detection speed between happy and angry targets. Experiment 3 revealed that reinstating specific instructions for Japanese participants restored the happy-face advantage, which was strongest when the faces in the display differed in ethnicity from the participant. The findings challenge the universality of the threat-superiority effect, suggesting that under realistic conditions with varied identities, happy faces hold a detection advantage due to their unique featural properties. The absence of this advantage in Japanese participants under standard conditions indicates that cultural display rules and attentional strategies significantly modulate emotional processing. The study concludes that the detection of emotional faces is not solely governed by automatic evolutionary mechanisms but is also influenced by cultural context and task-specific instructions.

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• cultural cross national