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Cultural effects in emotion and gender recognition
Author(s) -
Gul Amara,
Humphreys Glyn W.
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
asian journal of social psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.5
H-Index - 49
eISSN - 1467-839X
pISSN - 1367-2223
DOI - 10.1111/ajsp.12039
Subject(s) - psychology , priming (agriculture) , social psychology , dissociation (chemistry) , negative emotion , cognitive psychology , chemistry , botany , germination , biology
There is evidence for cultural differences in how people respond to basic properties of faces. We examined task switching between two properties of faces, emotion and gender, for individuals drawn from W estern ( W hite UK citizens) and A sian ( P akistani) cultures. There were three main results of interest. First, there was a double dissociation between gender and emotion classification across the participant populations – W estern participants were faster to make gender than emotion classifications while A sian participants were faster to make emotion than gender classifications. It is argued that the different patterns of results reflect the greater attentional weight given to contrasting face dimensions in the different cultures, and the dependence on using different attributes to make gender discriminations in individuals from varying cultures. Second, A sian participants showed smaller switch costs overall than did W hite B ritish participants. This result may be attributed to effects of bilingualism in the A sian participants, which results in their having greater executive resources. Third, emotion decisions showed larger switch costs than gender decisions but essentially because emotion decisions benefited from priming on non‐switch trials. It is argued that emotion decisions benefit from the activation of a specific processing module across consecutive trials.