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Expressing Control or Displaying Expression?

When understanding how other cultures express emotions, it is almost as important to reflect on our own cultural norms as it is to recognize differing ones.

This is essentially what Humintell’s Dr. David Matsumoto and his team find in a recent publication. Dr. Matsumoto studied the role that one’s own cultural norms and sense of emotional regulation have in evaluating the expressions of other people. Excitingly, they found a close link between our cultural norms of emotional displays and our own sense of emotional regulation, as they relate to evaluations of other people’s emotional states.

Their study sought to address the challenges in recognizing the often muted expressions of those from more subdued emotional cultures, but it also hoped to disentangle the perceiver’s own expectations and judgments from their evaluations.

In order to accomplish these aims, Dr. Matsumoto and his team conducted two studies. Both of these asking participants to identify the expression displayed in a series of images of faces, in addition to rating the intensity of the expression. Notably, the judges were split between English speakers raised in the United States and native-born Japanese participants, and the pictures included both American and Japanese faces.

In the first of these studies, judges were also asked to report their own emotional state’s intensity while judging images of faces, and they completed a measure intended to capture “cultural display rules” or the extent to which a culture encourages intense emotional expressions.

They found that cultural differences accounted for significant variations in how the judges evaluated the intensity of expressions, with Japanese judges tending to infer that an expression showcased more emotion than American judges.

The second study built on this work by replicating the same experiment only this time asking judges to evaluate their own emotional responsiveness. Dr. Matsumoto connects this to cultural display rules, because both have to do with the “management and modification of emotional expressions and reactions.”

After being shown expressive images, the judges would again make judgments as to the intensity of the emotion displayed, but this time they would also complete self-reported measures of emotional regulation. The results suggested that emotional regulation was at least as strong in mediating judgments as cultural norms.

The fact that cultural display norms and one’s own emotional regulation both mediate our perception of others’ emotions has profound implications for anyone attempting to better learn to read people. It is not enough for us to learn other people’s cultures, but we also have to critically reflect on our own norms, both personal and cultural.

This makes the process of emotional recognition just that much harder, which is why Humintell is trying to help by training you in the skill of reading people and understanding cultural differences.

Universal or Just Deceptive Emotions?

We spend a fair amount of this blog discussing the role of universal emotional expressions, but not everyone agrees.

Some emerging research, such as a recent study by Drs. Carlos Crivelli and Alan Fridlund, has begun to challenge some fundamental ideas related to the concept of basic emotions. This research questions whether facial expressions reflect emotions at all but instead reflect intentional social action.

For example, Dr. Crivelli has spent months interacting with indigenous groups like the Trobrianders of Papua New Guinea and the Mwani of Mozambique. When many of these people are shown basic emotion expressions, Dr. Crivelli found that they declined to identify those expressions with emotions.

Instead, a smile was described as “laughing” or as a feeling of being in “raptured enchantment.” Dr. Crivelli noticed that these referred not to emotions as much as to behaviors and actions. He found similar results when replicating these analyses among the Himba people of Namibia or the Hadza in Tanzania.

Moreover, a 2017 meta-analysis found that often facial expressions are not representing the emotion we would thing they should be, based on basic emotion theory. Instead, co-author Dr. Rainer Reisenzein suggested that openly expressing one’s emotions could “[put] us at a disadvantage” in an evolutionary sense.

Dr. Fridlund emphasized a similar point, stressing that emotions have strategic social motivations. Perhaps individuals are not revealing inner states but are trying to convey a specific state to you, so that you will act accordingly.

While many would see this research as a challenge to the idea of basic emotions, this isn’t really the case. Instead, it just underscores the importance of both incorporating microexpression analysis and deception detection. Microexpressions are actually just basic emotional expressions that are displayed almost instantaneously.

These microexpressions are the key to seeing through the sort of deceptive expressions that the aforementioned studies discuss. Certainly, your peer may be using a facial expression in a way that doesn’t just display the emotion in question, but their emotion is not completely concealed. It comes out in the form of a microexpression.

Still, this new cultural research helps elaborate on two complexities. First, many researchers may take for granted that the presence of expressions as showing underlying emotions. Such perceptions must take into account the possibility that others’ expressions are being used instrumentally.

Second, we must revisit the perennial issue of how to contextualize basic emotions into the admittedly distinctive manifestations that we see across cultures. Instead of speaking in terms of underlying emotions, some indigenous groups can simply describe the behaviors. What does this say about deception in those cultures? About emotional openness?

These are even more reasons to see what Humintell can do to better let you read microexpressions and to allow us to incorporate cultural differences into our people reading.

Framing a Reciprocal Interview

What is the impact of offering an interviewee a bottle of water?

This seemingly innocuous question actually delves into major questions both with regard to communication but interviewing techniques more specifically. By looking at this basic question in a recent study, Humintell’s Drs. David Matsumoto and Hyisung Hwang were attempting to look at the notion of reciprocity and whether more reciprocal interviewing tactics contribute to boosting rapport and information gathering.

The subject of reciprocity essentially looks at the idea that people want to return or reciprocate favors offered to them. So, if an interviewee is offered the simple kindness of bottled water, they would be more likely to feel obliged to provide additional information during the course of the interview.

Reciprocity is just one form of what is known as “social influence.” The theoretical literature identifies six principles of social influence that hold across cultures, but this study focuses on reciprocity which had been identified as one of the more powerful and pervasive aspects of social influence.

The study in question divided experimental groups around this simple treatment, offering water to half the participants. They hypothesized that this would boost rapport between interviewer and interviewee and would result in more relevant and plausible information.

These experimental groups were also divided internally between those who were asked to lie and those asked to tell the truth about whether they had stolen a $200 check. The experiment was set up to incentivize participants to lie to their best ability, as they were told that being suspected of deception would result in an extra-long questionnaire after the interview.

Drs. Matsumoto and Hwang found general support for their hypotheses. Liars tended to give more relevant and plausible details after being offered water. Interestingly, neither ethnicity nor culture had an impact. Rapport was also boosted by the reciprocal treatment.

This has significant ramifications for both interviewing tactics and efforts to boost rapport in social situations. When rapport was high, the interrogation proved more fruitful, and reciprocity helped accomplish that! This means that when interviewing an individual, efforts intended to elicit reciprocity may be helpful, even though an actual interview situation is generally a bit higher stakes.

But what does this mean for those of us who are just trying to get better at reading people? Sure, we can offer people we meet bottles of water, but that might be socially out of place! However, the basic principle of reciprocity will hold.

By offering something, be it a compliment, personal information about ourselves, or a gift, we can help create a sense of reciprocity, boosting rapport and better enabling us to know about other people. This is not just some manipulative tactic but also a way of developing better interactions and getting to know people!