Abstract

Evolutionary theories of emotion suggest that people consistently perceive emotions such as happiness, anger, fear, sadness, disgust, and surprise from several facial expressions of basic emotions across races and cultures. Although the universality hypothesis about basic emotion expressions is widely accepted in emotion fields, some argue that the methodological problems of choice-from array task commonly used in emotion research make it difficult to identify cultural differences in emotion perception. The present study examined the perception of basic emotions expressed on Korean, Japanese, and Caucasian faces by using two tasks that addressed issues with the traditional choice-from-array task. In Study 1, we conducted a free-labeling task in which participants freely generated emotion labels upon the recognition of emotional faces, and we subsequently categorized the verbal responses they produced. The results revealed that for faces expressing happiness, sadness, anger, and surprise, emotion labels were predominantly aligned with the intended target emotions. However, for faces expressing disgust, approximately half of the expressed labels belonged to the disgust category, while the other half belonged to the anger category. Verbal labels for faces expressing fear were predominantly associated with surprise rather than fear. Additionally, for facial expressions of disgust and fear, we observed an ingroup advantage, where response rates for the target emotion were higher for Korean faces compared to Caucasian and Japanese faces. In Study 2, we repeated the same analysis using an extended choice-from-array task with 24 high-frequency emotion labels collected from Study 1. The results indicated that labels related to anger were more frequently selected for expressions of disgust, and labels related to surprise were more likely to be associated with expressions of fear. An ingroup advantage was also observed for Korean faces displaying disgust compared to Japanese faces displaying disgust. Clustering analysis and multidimensional scaling revealed that the six basic emotional expressions were grouped into four separate clusters corresponding to happiness, sadness, anger, and surprise, respectively. These results suggest that, contrary to the general assumption that the six basic emotions are universally and independently perceived, Koreans tend to perceive expressions of disgust as anger and perceive expressions of fear as surprise. Taken together, our findings indicate that Koreans do not interpret disgust and fear from faces expressing those emotions in a ‘culturally universal way’. We suggest that the free-labeling task serves as an effective alternative to mitigate the methodological limitations of the choice-from-array task, particularly in identifying cultural differences in emotion perception across languages and societies.