Affective Information in Context and Judgment of Facial Expression: Cultural Similarities and Variations in Context Effects Between North Americans and East Asians

Previous research in cultural psychology suggests that North Americans are less likely than their East Asian counterparts to be sensitive to contextual information. By contrast, much evidence suggests that even North Americans’ judgments are highly influenced by affective priming information, the effect of which can be seen as another type of contextual cue. However, the magnitude of such a priming effect has not been comprehensively tested in a cross-cultural context. Taking advantage of the methodology of the affective priming paradigm, we conducted two studies, in which we manipulated (a) the timing of priming information (simultaneous vs. sequential) and (b) the type of affective information (background landscape vs. background human figures), in which European Canadians and Japanese judged target faces that showed either happy or sad facial expressions in the focal area of the scene. The results in general indicate that a similar degree of contextual effect occurs in members of both cultures. The issue of generalization of cross-cultural findings and the necessity of overarching more than one research paradigm are discussed.