Accuracy in the cross-cultural understanding of others' emotions

对他人情绪的跨文化理解的准确性

• 批准号: 0909615
• 负责人: Hillary Anger Elfenbein
• 金额: $ 14.68万
• 依托单位: Washington University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2008
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2008-09-01 至 2012-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0909615&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Accuracy; cross; cultural; understanding; others

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.

识别他人情绪状态的能力是了解他们的反应、态度、意图和可能的未来行为的窗口。识别这种情感信号的准确性是社会生活的重要适应。最近，加州大学伯克利分校（UC-Berkeley）的希拉里？埃尔芬拜因（Hillary Anger Elfenbein）博士和她的同事进行的一项研究表明，在解读来自外国文化群体的个人情绪表达时，这种准确性较低。目前的建议旨在更好地理解这种跨文化挑战，并为克服它提供指导。PI的新的情感“方言理论”认为，不同的文化群体用微妙的不同风格表达情感——就像一种语言的不同方言，比如英式英语和美式英语——用熟悉的风格表达情感更容易理解。由于这是一个目前争论激烈的领域，目前的建议包括一系列研究，通过检查自发面部表情、声调和肢体语言的表达和判断方面的文化差异，来测试这种新方言理论提出的具体机制。这项研究是及时和相关的，为判断一个有争议的新理论提供了数据，以及它对社会的潜在利益。研究结果旨在为应对现代社会的快速变化提供指导，例如文化多样性的增加。与以往相比，美国人与来自不同文化背景的人更密切地合作。了解多元文化环境中沟通障碍的本质是很重要的，这样才能促进沟通的突破。此外，该项目通过将美洲原住民纳入研究过程，扩大了代表性不足群体的参与。