Learning Emotional Dialects: A British Population Study of Cross-Cultural Communication

The aim of the current research was to explore whether we can improve the recognition of cross-cultural freely expressed emotional faces in British participants. We tested several methods for improving the recognition of freely expressed emotional faces, such as different methods for presenting other-culture expressions of emotion from individuals from Chile, New Zealand and Singapore in two experimental stages. In the first experimental stage, in phase one, participants were asked to identify the emotion of cross-cultural freely-expressed faces. In the second phase, different cohorts were presented with interactive side-by-side, back-to-back and dynamic morphing of cross cultural freely-expressed emotional faces, and control conditions. In the final phase, we repeated phase one using novel stimuli. We found that all non-control conditions led to recognition improvements. Morphing was the most effective condition for improving the recognition of cross cultural emotional faces. In the second experimental stage, we presented morphing to different cohorts including own to-other and other-to-own freely-expressed cross-cultural emotional faces and neutral-to-emotional and emotional to-neutral other-culture freely-expressed emotional faces. All conditions led to recognition improvements and the presentation of freely-expressed own-to-other cultural emotional faces provided the most effective learning. These findings suggest that training can improve the recognition of cross-cultural freely-expressed emotional expressions.