Positive emotional regard towards the host culture mediates the way bicultural bilinguals detect emotional cues of facial expressions of happiness in a visual search task

Damjanovic, Ljubica; Athanasopoulos, Panos; Reguliova, Andrea; Kasai, Chise; Petersdotter, Linn; Roberson, Debi · 2025 · Crossref

DOI: 10.1007/s41809-025-00164-y

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Summary

This study investigates how cultural experience influences the detection of emotional facial expressions, specifically examining whether bicultural bilinguals adapt their attentional biases toward happiness cues after living in a host culture. The research addresses a gap in literature regarding how individuals with dual cultural and linguistic frameworks process emotions, contrasting previous monocultural findings where Western participants typically show a "happiness advantage" (faster detection of happy faces) while Japanese participants show no such bias. The authors hypothesized that Japanese sojourners in the UK might develop this happiness advantage due to cultural adaptation, and sought to determine whether this shift is driven by the duration of exposure or the quality of emotional engagement with the host culture. The experimental design involved three groups: 20 European British participants in the UK, 20 Asian Japanese participants in Japan, and 20 Asian Japanese participants residing in the UK. Participants performed a visual search task using stimuli from the Matsumoto and Ekman database, which included Asian Japanese and European American faces. They were required to identify a target face displaying either happiness or anger amidst a background of neutral faces. The study measured response times and error rates to assess detection speed. Additionally, the Japanese sojourners completed questionnaires assessing their length of stay in the UK, language use, L2 proficiency, and their positive or negative emotional regard for their experience in the host country. The results replicated established cross-cultural differences: British participants demonstrated a significant search advantage for happy faces, whereas Japanese participants in Japan showed equivalent response times for happy and angry expressions. Crucially, Japanese participants living in the UK exhibited a detection advantage favoring happy faces, resembling the British group rather than their counterparts in Japan. Correlational analyses revealed that this shift in visual search performance was mediated by the participants' positive emotional regard toward the host culture. The length of exposure to the host culture alone did not predict the change in detection bias; rather, it was the quality of the inter-group contact and emotional adaptation that modulated attentional mechanisms. These findings suggest that cognitive restructuring in emotion perception is driven by the quality of cultural immersion rather than mere duration of stay. The study highlights that bicultural bilinguals can adapt their implicit attentional biases to align with host cultural norms, specifically regarding the salience of positive social cues like smiles. This implies that emotional perception is not fixed but is shaped by individual experiences and attitudes toward the new cultural environment. The results underscore the importance of considering emotional engagement and regard for the host culture when studying how bilinguals and bicultural individuals process social and emotional information.

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• cultural cross national