An enculturation-induced joy bias for emotion recognition in full-body-movement

Abstract

Abstract While emotional expression via the body is universal across cultures, labelling emotions into ‘emotion-word’ categories is not universal, but learned—especially in the West. Based on previous work using Western expressive gestures, we designed a video-stimuli library with emotionally expressive gestures from a non-WEIRD cultural tradition, which our participants had different levels of enculturation with. Stimuli consisted of 6-s-long sequences of Iranian social dance gestures, danced five-times each with different emotional expressivities, so that the same movement trajectories were used to express five ‘basic’ emotions (anger, fear, joy, sadness, neutrality). Across two experiments with 200 Iranian, English, and Southeast Asian participants (one pre-registered), we tested how enculturation modulated emotion perception from full-body movement. Using continuous measures of enculturation with Iranian and English culture, we found that categorical emotion labelling was modulated by English enculturation, while enculturation with Iranian culture produced a ‘joy bias’; a tendency to attribute joyful expressivity to the movements, in accordance with the joyful festive context in which these social dance gestures usually occur. These results evidence an effect of enculturation on emotion perception, in line with the theory of constructed emotion.