Accuracy in the cross-cultural understanding of others' emotions

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The ability to recognize the emotional states of other people serves as a window into their reactions, attitudes, intentions, and likely future behaviors. The accuracy of recognizing such emotional signals is an important adaptation for social life. Recently, research conducted by Dr. Hillary Anger Elfenbein at UC-Berkeley and her colleagues suggests that this accuracy is lower when reading the emotional expressions of individuals from foreign cultural groups. The current proposal seeks to understand better this cross-cultural challenge and to provide guidance for overcoming it. The PI's new "dialect theory" of emotion argues that different cultural groups express emotions with subtly different styles -- like different dialects of a language, such as British versus American English -- and that it is easier to understand emotions expressed in a familiar style. Because this is an area of intense current debate, the current proposal consists of a series of studies to test the specific mechanisms proposed by this new dialect theory, by examining cultural differences in the expression and judgment of spontaneous facial expressions, vocal tones, and body language. This research is timely and relevant for providing the data to judge a controversial new theory, as well as for its potential benefits to society. The findings aim to offer guidance to cope with rapid changes in the modern society, such as increasing cultural diversity. Americans work closely with people from multiple cultural backgrounds more than was previously the case. It is important to understand the nature of communication breakdowns in multicultural environments, in order to facilitate communication breakthroughs. In addition, the project broadens participation from underrepresented groups by including Native Americans in the research process.