Masuda Takahiko, Shi Shuwei, Varma Pragya, Fisher Delaney, Shirazi Safi
Department of Psychology, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada.
Front Hum Neurosci. 2022 Jul 5;16:886971. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2022.886971. eCollection 2022.
Previous studies in cultural psychology have suggested that when assessing a target person's emotion, East Asians are more likely to incorporate the background figure's emotion into the judgment of the target's emotion compared to North Americans. The objective of this study was to further examine cultural variation in emotion perception within a culturally diverse population that is representative of Canada's multicultural society. We aimed to see whether East-Asian Canadians tended to keep holistic tendencies of their heritage culture regarding emotion perception. Participants were presented with 60 cartoon images consisting of a central figure and four surrounding figures and were then asked to rate the central figure's emotion; out of the four cartoon figures, two were female and two were male. Each character was prepared with 5 different emotional settings with corresponding facial expressions including: extremely sad, moderately sad, neutral, moderately happy, and extremely happy. Each central figure was surrounded by a group of 4 background figures. As a group, the background figures either displayed a sad, happy, or neutral expression. The participant's task was to judge the intensity of the central figures' happiness or sadness on a 10-point Likert scale ranging from 0 (not at all) to 9 (extremely). For analysis, we divided the participants into three groups: European Canadians ( = 105), East Asian Canadians' ( = 104) and Non-East Asian/Non-European Canadians ( = 161). The breakdown for the Non-East Asian/Non-European Canadian group is as follows: 94 South Asian Canadians, 25 Middle Eastern Canadians, 23 African Canadians, 9 Indigenous Canadians, and 10 Latin/Central/South American Canadians. Results comparing European Canadians and East Asian Canadians demonstrated cultural variation in emotion judgment, indicating that East Asian Canadians were in general more likely than their European Canadian counterparts to be affected by the background figures' emotion. The study highlights important cultural variations in holistic and analytic patterns of emotional attention in the ethnically diverse Canadian society. We discussed future studies which broaden the scope of research to incorporate a variety of diverse cultural backgrounds outside of the Western educational context to fully comprehend cultural variations in context related attentional patterns.
文化心理学领域先前的研究表明，在评估目标人物的情绪时，与北美人相比，东亚人更有可能将背景人物的情绪纳入对目标人物情绪的判断中。本研究的目的是在代表加拿大多元文化社会的文化多元化人群中，进一步考察情绪感知方面的文化差异。我们旨在了解加拿大东亚人在情绪感知方面是否倾向于保留其传统文化的整体倾向。研究人员向参与者展示了60张卡通图片，图片中有一个中心人物和四个周围人物，然后要求他们对中心人物的情绪进行评分；在这四个卡通人物中，两个是女性，两个是男性。每个角色都配有5种不同的情绪设定以及相应的面部表情，包括：极度悲伤、中度悲伤、中性、中度快乐和极度快乐。每个中心人物都被一组4个背景人物环绕。作为一个整体，背景人物要么表现出悲伤、快乐或中性的表情。参与者的任务是在从0（完全没有）到9（极度）的10点李克特量表上判断中心人物快乐或悲伤的强度。为了进行分析，我们将参与者分为三组：欧裔加拿大人（=105）、加拿大东亚人（=104）和非东亚/非欧洲裔加拿大人（=161）。非东亚/非欧洲裔加拿大人组的细分如下：94名南亚裔加拿大人、25名中东裔加拿大人、23名非洲裔加拿大人、9名原住民加拿大人和10名拉丁/中/南美洲裔加拿大人。比较欧裔加拿大人和加拿大东亚人的结果表明，在情绪判断方面存在文化差异，这表明加拿大东亚人总体上比欧裔加拿大同龄人更容易受到背景人物情绪的影响。该研究突出了加拿大这个种族多样化社会中情绪注意力的整体和分析模式方面的重要文化差异。我们讨论了未来的研究，这些研究将拓宽研究范围，纳入西方教育背景之外的各种不同文化背景，以全面理解与情境相关的注意力模式中的文化差异。
