Culture Shapes the Distinctiveness of Posed and Spontaneous Facial Expressions of Anger and Disgust

There is a growing consensus that culture influences the perception of facial expressions of emotion. However, relatively few studies have examined whether and how culture shapes the production of emotional facial expressions. Drawing on prior work on cultural differences in communication styles, we tested the prediction that people from the Netherlands (a low-context culture) produce facial expressions that are more distinct across emotions compared to people from China (a high-context culture). Furthermore, we examined whether the degree of distinctiveness varies across posed and spontaneous expressions. Dutch and Chinese participants were instructed to either pose facial expressions of anger and disgust, or to share autobiographical events that elicited spontaneous expressions of anger or disgust. Using a supervised machine learning approach to categorize expressions based on the patterns of activated facial action units, we showed that both posed and spontaneous facial expressions of anger and disgust were more distinct when produced by Dutch compared to Chinese participants. Yet, the distinctiveness of posed and spontaneous expressions differed in their sources. The difference in the distinctiveness of posed expressions appears to be due to a larger array of facial expression prototypes for each emotion in Chinese culture than in Dutch culture. The difference in the distinctiveness of spontaneous expressions, however, appears to reflect the greater similarity of expressions of anger and disgust from the same Chinese individual than from the same Dutch individual. The implications of these findings are discussed in relation to cross-cultural emotion communication, including via cultural products.