The role of affective information in context on the judgment of facial expression: in what situations are North Americans influenced by contextual information?

• Main Author: Ito, Kenichi
• Other Authors: Masuda, Takahioko (Psychology)
• Format: Others
• Language: en
• Published: 2010
• Subjects: Cross-cultural comparison; Facial expressions; Contextual influence
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10048/1276

Research in cultural psychology suggests that East Asians are more likely than North Americans to be sensitive to contextual information. By contrast, much evidence suggests that even North Americans judgments are influenced by affective priming information, the effect of which can be seen as another type of contextual cue. However, the magnitude of such priming effect has not been tested in a cross-cultural context. Using the methodology of the affective priming paradigm, we conducted two studies, in which we manipulated (a) the timing of priming information (simultaneous vs. sequential) and (b) the type of affective information (background landscape vs. background human figures), in which European Canadians and Japanese judged either happy or sad facial expressions in the focal area of the scene. The results indicate that the two cultural groups are similar when contextual information is salient, but only Japanese remain sensitive to context with subtle cues.