Crosscultural differences in the multisensory perception of emotion

Abstract

Cultural differences in the emotion recognition have mainly been reported for facial expressions and to a lesser extent for vocal expressions. But the way in which the perceiver combines auditory and visual cues may itself be subject to cultural variability. In the experiment, pairs of affective faces and voices, expressing either congruent or incongruent emotion, were presented simultaneously. The difficulty between face and voice judgments was matched by adding noises onto the faces. The effect of to-be-ignored voice on the facial judgment was larger in the Japanese than the Dutch group whereas the effect of to-be-ignored face on the vocal judgment was smaller. These results suggest that Japanese are more tuned to vocal processing in the multisensory perception of emotion.