In their classic study, Ekman and Friesen (1971) identified seven facial expressions recognised by people universally across all cultures as depicting certain emotions: happiness, sadness, surprise, fear, anger, disgust and contempt. This is quite solid paradigm, but recent studies showed some cross cultural differences. For example Western Caucasian observers tend to look fairly evenly across all areas of the face, whereas Eastern Asian observers focus their attention toward the eye region (Jack et al., 2009).
Ekman, P., & Friesen, W. V. (1971). Constants across cultures in the face and emotion. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 17(2), 124-129.
Jack, R. E., Blais, C., Scheepers, C., Schyns, P. G., & Caldara, R. (2009). Cultural confusions show that facial expressions are not universal. Current biology, 19(18), 1543-8.
While facial expression literature on the topic is vast, there is very limited research into cross cultural differences in perception of emotions from dynamic body expression. There have been some attempts to look at the static body posture (Kleinsmith et al., 2006), but virtually nothing on the dynamic body expressions. Ok, there is one study by Sneddon et al. (2011) but their stimuli contain facial expression together with movement, and I am specifically interested in the research where participants only view body movement/expression.
Kleinsmith, A., De Silva, P. R., & Bianchi-Berthouze, N. (2006). Cross-cultural differences in recognizing affect from body posture. Interact. Comput., 18(6), 1371-1389.
Elfenbein, H. (2003). Universals and Cultural Differences in Recognizing Emotions. Current Directions in Psychological, 159-164.
Sneddon, I., McKeown, G., McRorie, M., & Vukicevic, T. (2011). Cross-cultural patterns in dynamic ratings of positive and negative natural emotional behaviour. PloS one, 6(2).
Is there any (published) research that has been done on comparing cross cultural differences in the perception of emotions from body movement?
