Skip to main content
Disciplines
Automotive Business IT + Informatics Construction + Real Estate Electrical Engineering + Electronics Energy + Sustainability Insurance + Risk Finance + Banking Management + Leadership Marketing + Sales Mechanical Engineering + Materials
Events
DE
EN
Books
Journals
Topic Page
Marketing
Start single access now
Access for companies
EXTENDED SEARCH
Log in
Top
Journal of Nonverbal Behavior
Published in: Journal of Nonverbal Behavior 1/2017

08-11-2016 | Original Paper

Large-Scale Observational Evidence of Cross-Cultural Differences in Facial Behavior

Authors: Daniel McDuff, Jeffrey M. Girard, Rana el Kaliouby

Published in: Journal of Nonverbal Behavior | Issue 1/2017

Log in

Activate our intelligent search to find suitable subject content or patents.

search-config
loading …

Abstract

Self-report studies have found evidence that cultures differ in the display rules they have for facial expressions (i.e., for what is appropriate for different people at different times). However, observational studies of actual patterns of facial behavior have been rare and typically limited to the analysis of dozens of participants from two or three regions. We present the first large-scale evidence of cultural differences in observed facial behavior, including 740,984 participants from 12 countries around the world. We used an Internet-based framework to collect video data of participants in two different settings: in their homes and in market research facilities. Using computer vision algorithms designed for this dataset, we measured smiling and brow furrowing expressions as participants watched television ads. Our results reveal novel findings and provide empirical evidence to support theories about cultural and gender differences in display rules. Participants from more individualist cultures displayed more brow furrowing overall, whereas smiling depended on both culture and setting. Specifically, participants from more individualist countries were more expressive in the facility setting, while participants from more collectivist countries were more expressive in the home setting. Female participants displayed more smiling and less brow furrowing than male participants overall, with the latter difference being more pronounced in more individualist countries. This is the first study to leverage advances in computer science to enable large-scale observational research that would not have been possible using traditional methods.
next article Can I Trust You? Laterality of Facial Trustworthiness in an Economic Game

Dont have a licence yet? Then find out more about our products and how to get one now:

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

  • über 102.000 Bücher
  • über 537 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

  • Automobil + Motoren
  • Bauwesen + Immobilien
  • Business IT + Informatik
  • Elektrotechnik + Elektronik
  • Energie + Nachhaltigkeit
  • Finance + Banking
  • Management + Führung
  • Marketing + Vertrieb
  • Maschinenbau + Werkstoffe
  • Versicherung + Risiko

Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

inform now

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Wirtschaft" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

  • über 67.000 Bücher
  • über 340 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

  • Bauwesen + Immobilien
  • Business IT + Informatik
  • Finance + Banking
  • Management + Führung
  • Marketing + Vertrieb
  • Versicherung + Risiko




Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

inform now
Footnotes
1
The base rate is the proportion of time that a participant displays a facial action.
 
Literature
Ansfield, M. E. (2007). Smiling when distressed: When a smile is a frown turned upside down. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 33(6), 763–775.CrossRefPubMed
Argyle, M., Henderson, M., Bond, M., Iizuka, Y., & Contarello, A. (1986). Cross-cultural variations in relationship rules. International Journal of Psychology, 21(1–4), 287–315.CrossRef
Brennan, R. L., & Prediger, D. J. (1981). Coefficient Kappa: Some uses, misuses, and alternatives. Educational and Psychological Measurement, 41(3), 687–699.CrossRef
Brewer, M. B., & Kramer, R. M. (1985). The psychology of intergroup attitudes and behavior. Annual Review of Psychology, 36(1), 219–243.CrossRef
Brody, L. R., & Hall, J. A. (2008). Gender and emotion in context. In M. Lewis, J. M. Haviland-Jones, & L. F. Barrett (Eds.), Handbook of emotions (3rd ed., pp. 395–408). New York, NY: The Guilford Press.
Button, K. S., Ioannidis, J. P. A., Mokrysz, C., Nosek, B. A., Flint, J., & Robinson, E. S. J. (2013). Power failure: Why small sample size undermines the reliability of neuroscience. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 14(5), 365–376.CrossRefPubMed
Cacioppo, J. T., Petty, R. E., Losch, M. E., & Kim, H. S. (1986). Electromyographic activity over facial muscle regions can differentiate the valence and intensity of affective reactions. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 50(2), 260.CrossRefPubMed
Cacioppo, J. T., & Tassinary, L. G. (1990). Inferring psychological significance from physiological signals. The American Psychologist, 45(1), 16–28.CrossRefPubMed
Camras, L. A., Bakeman, R., Chen, Y., Norris, K., & Cain, T. R. (2006). Culture, ethnicity, and children’s facial expressions: A study of European American, Mainland Chinese, Chinese American, and adopted Chinese girls. Emotion, 6(1), 103–114.CrossRefPubMed
Camras, L. A., Oster, H., Campos, J., Campos, R., Ujiie, T., Miyake, K., et al. (1998). Production of emotional facial expressions in European American, Japanese, and Chinese infants. Developmental Psychology, 34(4), 616–628.CrossRefPubMed
Casella, G., & George, E. I. (1992). Explaining the gibbs sampler. The American Statistician, 46(3), 167–174.
Cohn, J. F., & Ekman, P. (2005). Measuring facial action by manual coding, facial EMG, and automatic facial image analysis. In J. A. Harrigan, R. Rosenthal, & K. R. Scherer (Eds.), The new handbook of nonverbal behavior research (pp. 9–64). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Darwin, C. (1872). The expression of emotions in man and animals (3rd ed.). New York, NY: Oxford University.CrossRef
Ekman, P. (1977). Biological and cultural contributions to body and facial movement. In J. Blacking (Ed.), The anthropology of the body. London: Academic Press.
Ekman, P. (1979). About brows: Emotional and conversational signals. In M. V. Cranach, K. Foppa, W. Lepenies, & D. Ploog (Eds.), Human ethology (pp. 169–202). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ekman, P. (1982). Methods for measuring facial action. In K. R. Scherer & P. Ekman (Eds.), Handbook of methods in nonverbal behavior research (pp. 45–90). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ekman, P., Davidson, R. J., & Friesen, W. V. (1990). The Duchenne smile: Emotional expression and brain physiology: II. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 58(2), 342–353.CrossRefPubMed
Ekman, P., & Friesen, W. V. (1971). Constants across cultures in the face and emotion. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 17, 124–129.CrossRefPubMed
Ekman, P., Friesen, W. V., & Ellsworth, P. (1972). Emotion in the human face: Guidelines for research and an integration of findings. New York, NY: Pergamon Press.
Ekman, P., Friesen, W. V., & Hager, J. (2002). Facial action coding system: A technique for the measurement of facial movement. Salt Lake City, UT: Research Nexus.
Ekman, P., Friesen, W. V., O’Sullivan, M., Chan, A., Diacoyanni-Tarlatzis, I., Heider, K., et al. (1987). Universals and cultural differences in the judgments of facial expressions of emotion. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 53(4), 712–717.CrossRefPubMed
Ekman, P., & Rosenberg, E. L. (2005). What the face reveals: Basic and applied studies of spontaneous expression using the facial action coding system (FACS) (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.CrossRef
Ekman, P., Sorenson, E. R., & Friesen, W. V. (1969). Pan-cultural elements in facial displays of emotion. Science, 164(3875), 86–88.CrossRefPubMed
Evans, E. C. (1969). Physiognomies in the ancient world. Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 59, 1–101.CrossRef
Fischer, A. H., & Manstead, A. S. R. (2000). The relation between gender and emotions in different cultures. In A. H. Fischer (Ed.), Gender and emotion: Social psychological perspectives (pp. 71–94). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.CrossRef
Fridlund, A. J. (1991). Sociality of solitary smiling: Potentiation by an implicit audience. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 60(2), 229–240.CrossRef
Friesen, W. V. (1973). Cultural differences in facial expressions in a social situation: An experimental test on the concept of display rules (Doctoral dissertation). University of California San Francisco.
Frith, H., & Kitzinger, C. (1998). “Emotion work” as a participant re-source: A feminist analysis of young women’s talk-in-interaction. Sociology, 32, 299–320.CrossRef
Girard, J. M., & Cohn, J. F. (2016). A primer on observational measurement. Assessment, 23(4), 404–413.CrossRefPubMed
Girard, J. M., Cohn, J. F., Jeni, L. A., Sayette, M. A., & De la Torre, F. (2015). Spontaneous facial expression in unscripted social interactions can be measured automatically. Behavior Research Methods, 47(4), 1136–1147.CrossRefPubMedPubMedCentral
Girard, J. M., Cohn, J. F., Mahoor, M. H., Mavadati, S. M., Hammal, Z., & Rosenwald, D. P. (2014). Nonverbal social withdrawal in depression: Evidence from manual and automatic analyses. Image and Vision Computing, 32(10), 641–647.CrossRefPubMedPubMedCentral
Gosling, S. D., John, O. E., Craik, K. H., & Robins, R. W. (1998). Do people know how they behave? Self-reported act frequencies compared with on-line codings by observers. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74(5), 1337–1349.CrossRefPubMed
Hall, J. A., & Halberstadt, A. G. (1986). Smiling and gazing. In J. S. Hyde & M. C. Inn (Eds.), The psychology of gender: Advances through meta-analysis (pp. 136–185). Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Hecht, M. A., & LaFrance, M. (1998). License or obligation to smile: The effect of power and sex on amount and type of smiling. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 24(12), 1332–1342.CrossRef
Heck, R. H., & Thomas, S. L. (2015). An introduction to multilevel modeling techniques: MLM and SEM approaches using Mplus (3rd ed.). New York, NY: Routledge.
Hess, U., Adams, R. B., Jr., & Kleck, R. E. (2005). Who may frown and who should smile? Dominance, affiliation, and the display of happiness and anger. Cognition and Emotion, 19(4), 515–536.CrossRef
Hofstede, G. H. (1980). Culture’s consequences: International differences in work-related values. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications.
Hofstede, G. H. (2001). Culture’s consequences: Comparing values, behaviors, institutions and organizations across nations (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications.
Hofstede, G. H., & McCrae, R. R. (2004). Personality and culture revisited: Linking traits and dimensions of culture. Cross-Cultural Research, 38(1), 52–88.CrossRef
Kagan, J., Arcus, D., Snidman, N., Feng, W. Y., Hendler, J., & Greene, S. (1994). Reactivity in infants: A cross-national comparison. Developmental Psychology, 30(3), 342–345.CrossRef
Kisilevsky, B. S., Hains, S. M. J., Lee, K., Muir, D. W., Xu, F., Fu, G., et al. (1998). The still-face effect in Chinese and Canadian 3- to 6-month-old infants. Developmental Psychology, 34(4), 629–639.CrossRefPubMed
LaFrance, M., Hecht, M. A., & Paluck, E. L. (2003). The contingent smile: A meta-analysis of sex differences in smiling. Psychological Bulletin, 129(2), 305–334.CrossRefPubMed
Markus, H. R., & Kitayama, S. (1991). Culture and the self: Implications for cognition, emotion, and motivation. Psychological Review, 98(2), 224–253.CrossRef
Matsumoto, D. (1990). Cultural similarities and differences in display rules. Motivation and Emotion, 14(3), 195–214.CrossRef
Matsumoto, D. (2006). Culture and nonverbal behavior. In Handbook of nonverbal communication (pp. 219–236).
Matsumoto, D., & Kupperbusch, C. (2001). Idiocentric and allocentric differences in emotional expression, experience, and the coherence between expression and experience. Asian Journal of Social Psychology, 4(2), 113–131.CrossRef
Matsumoto, D., & Willingham, B. (2006). The thrill of victory and the agony of defeat: Spontaneous expressions of medal winners of the 2004 Athens Olympic games. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 91(3), 568–581.CrossRefPubMed
Matsumoto, D., Willingham, B., & Olide, A. (2009). Sequential dynamics and culturally-moderated facial expressions of emotion. Psychological Science, 20(10), 1269–1274.CrossRefPubMed
Matsumoto, D., Yoo, S. H., & Fontaine, J. (2008). Mapping expressive differences around the world: The relationship between emotional display rules and individualism versus collectivism. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 39(1), 55–74.CrossRef
McCrae, R. R., & Costa, P. T. (1999). A five-factor theory of personality. In L. A. Pervin & O. John (Eds.), Handbook of personality: Theory and research (2nd ed., pp. 139–153). New York, NY: Guilford Press.
McDuff, D. (2014). Crowdsourcing affective responses for predicting media effectiveness (Doctoral dissertation). Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
McGraw, K. O., & Wong, S. P. (1996). Forming inferences about some intraclass correlation coefficients. Psychological Methods, 1(1), 30–46.CrossRef
Messick, D. M., & Mackie, D. M. (1989). Intergroup relations. Annual Review of Psychology, 40, 45–81.CrossRefPubMed
Muthén, L. K., & Muthén, B. O. (2012). Mplus user’s guide (7th ed.). Los Angeles, CA: Muthén & Muthén.
Oster, H. (1978). Facial expression and affect development. In M. Lewis & L. A. Rosenblum (Eds.), The development of affect. New York, NY: Plenum Press.
Oster, H., Daily, L., & Goldenthal, P. (1989). Processing facial affect. In A. W. Young & H. D. Ellis (Eds.), Handbook of research on face processing (pp. 101–161). Amsterdam: Elsevier.
Oyserman, D., Coon, H. M., & Kemmelmeier, M. (2002). Rethinking individualism and collectivism: Evaluation of theoretical assumptions and meta-analyses. Psychological Bulletin, 128(1), 3.CrossRefPubMed
Russell, J. A. (1994). Is there universal recognition of emotion from facial expressions? A review of the cross-cultural studies. Psychological Bulletin, 115(1), 102.PubMed
Rychlowska, M., Miyamoto, Y., Matsumoto, D., Hess, U., Gilboa-Schechtman, E., Kamble, S., et al. (2015). Heterogeneity of long-history migration explains cultural differences in reports of emotional expressivity and the functions of smiles. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112(19), E2429–E2436.CrossRef
Schafer, J. L., & Graham, J. W. (2002). Missing data: Our view of the state of the art. Psychological Methods, 7(2), 147–177.CrossRefPubMed
Scherer, K. R., Wallbott, H. F., & Summerfield, A. B. (1986). Experiencing emotion: A cross-cultural study. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Schwartz, G. E., Ahern, G. L., & Brown, S. L. (1979). Lateralized facial muscle response to positive and negative emotional stimuli. Psychophysiology, 16(6), 561–571.CrossRefPubMed
Senechal, T., McDuff, D., & Kaliouby, R. (2015). Facial action unit detection using active learning and an efficient non-linear kernel approximation. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision Workshops (pp. 10–18).
Singelis, T. M. (1994). The measurement of independent and interdependent self-construals. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 20(5), 580–591.CrossRef
Suh, E., Diener, E., Oishi, S., & Triandis, H. C. (1998). The shifting basis of life satisfaction judgments across cultures: Emotions versus norms. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74(2), 482–493.CrossRef
Tajfel, H. (1982). Social psychology of intergroup relations. Annual Review of Psychology, 33(1), 1–39.CrossRef
Waxer, P. H. (1985). Video ethology: Television as a data base for cross-cultural studies in nonverbal displays. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 9(2), 111–120.CrossRef
Metadata
Title
Large-Scale Observational Evidence of Cross-Cultural Differences in Facial Behavior
Authors
Daniel McDuff
Jeffrey M. Girard
Rana el Kaliouby
Publication date
08-11-2016
Publisher
Springer US
Published in
Journal of Nonverbal Behavior / Issue 1/2017
Print ISSN: 0191-5886
Electronic ISSN: 1573-3653
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10919-016-0244-x

Other articles of this Issue 1/2017

Journal of Nonverbal Behavior 1/2017 Go to the issue

Original Paper

Evidence of Big Five and Aggressive Personalities in Gait Biomechanics

Original Paper

When Sharing a Laugh Means Sharing More: Testing the Role of Shared Laughter on Short-Term Interpersonal Consequences

Acknowledgments

Ad-Hoc Reviewers from 2016

Original Paper

Can I Trust You? Laterality of Facial Trustworthiness in an Economic Game

Original Paper

Children’s Nonverbal Displays of Winning and Losing: Effects of Social and Cultural Contexts on Smiles