Cross-cultural emotion recognition in adults and children

The current studies investigated cross-cultural emotion recognition in South Asian and Caucasian Canadian adults and children. The two main goals of the current research were to disentangle the effects of culture and race on cross-cultural emotion recognition and to chart the development of cross-cultural differences in emotion recognition. Both adults and children completed an emotion recognition task, viewing faces of four different racial/cultural groups (South Asian Canadians and immigrants, Caucasian Canadian and immigrants). Adults completed a cultural identification task with these four racial/cultural groups and a contact questionnaire that assessed their exposure to Caucasian and South Asian individuals. Findings revealed that Caucasian and South Asian Canadian adults showed cross-cultural differences in emotion recognition; however, children did not. Furthermore, adults were able to identify the cultural background of Caucasian and South Asian faces at above-chance levels. Finally, results indicated that higher levels of cross-cultural exposure were related to improved cross-cultural emotion recognition for Caucasian adults only.