内集団と外集団に所属する他者の内面の推論は異なるのか？発達的観点からの検討

抄録

Inferring others’ inner states is an important ability in guiding our behaviours during social interactions. There are intercultural differences in the perception of emotional expressions. We investigated the judgment of inner states’ of Japanese and British subjects by Japanese perceivers.

95 Japanese perceivers from three age groups （6-, 9-years, and university students） viewed videos of 8 British and 8 Japanese people’s facial expressions as they reflected on different emotional experiences （happy, grateful, sad and angry）.

To create the target stimuli, we captured the natural expressions of the subjects while they were reminiscing about relevant past events. These stimuli include more subtle signals than ‘acted’ facial expressions and require a more sensitive inference from the perceivers.

The perceivers viewed a 15-second video of each of the subjects’ facial expressions and made a judgement using a four-alternative forced choice method. The experiment lasted less than 30 minutes for each perceiver. The procedures were approved by the university’s ethics committee together with written consent from the participants or participants’ guardians.

These results were coded to produce d-prime values. To address whether the Japanese perceivers’ judgements of their ethnic in-group was more accurate, a three-way ANOVA （3 age x 4 emotion x 2 target ethnicity） for d-prime was conducted. For the angry emotion, the 9- years and students judged Japanese subjects more accurately. For the happy emotion, all three age groups judged British targets more accurately. The implications of using natural stimuli for intercultural investigations are discussed.