Trial reportEmotion (Washington, D.C.)2014
Perceptions of emotion from facial expressions are not culturally universal: evidence from a remote culture.
Trial report in Emotion (Washington, D.C.), 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 106 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
106 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Understanding irritability through the lens of self-regulatory control processes in children and adolescents: a systematic review.European child & adolescent psychiatry · 2025Pooled it
- Emotion fingerprints or emotion populations? A meta-analytic investigation of autonomic features of emotion categories.Psychological bulletin · 2018Pooled it
- Effect of attention bias modification on depressive affect.Scientific reports · 2025Trial
- Training reduces error in rating the intensity of emotions.Emotion (Washington, D.C.) · 2022Trial
- Trait judgements of faces using a task without word labels.Nature human behaviour · 2026Article
- Distinct affective neural phenotypes in breast cancer survivors: implications for personalized supportive care after chemotherapy.Supportive care in cancer : official journal of the Multinational Association of Supportive Care in Cancer · 2026Article
- Measurement of Emotions Tacting for Empathic Responding (METER): An Example of a Process for Creating an Inclusive Assessment of Emotion Recognition using Validated and Diverse Facial Expression Stimuli.Behavior analysis in practice · 2026Article
- Exploring the Guessing-Game Experimental Paradigm: Inferences From Closed- Versus Open-Ended Semantic Space.Cognitive science · 2026Article
- Cross-Cultural Consortium on Irritability (C3I): An International Network for Research on Cultural Similarities and Differences in Irritability.JAACAP open · 2026Article
- Dynamic emotion fabric theory: a new framework for understanding the biology of flexible emotion states.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2026Review
- The unity of sense and mind: A review of cross-domain mapping.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2026Review
- Near-Field Radio-Frequency for Real-Time Facial Expression Recognition.IEEE access : practical innovations, open solutions · 2026Article
- Reframing "flat affect" and withdrawal in severe mental illness: a within-subject, culture- and medication-sensitive heuristic for social psychiatry.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2026Article
- Divergence between facial expressions and self-reported emotions: Sex differences in responses to video-based emotional stimuli.PloS one · 2026Article
- Beyond Valence and Arousal: Distributed Facial Patterns Linked to Specific Emotions Cannot be Reduced to Core Affect.Affective science · 2025Article
- Investigating the Structure of Emotion: Tools, Pitfalls and Recommendations.Affective science · 2025Article
- Cross-country variance in facial emotion recognition in presymptomatic and symptomatic behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia: Insights from the GENFI and ReDLat consortia.Alzheimer's & dementia : the journal of the Alzheimer's Association · 2025Observational
- Network models reveal high-dimensional social inferences in naturalistic settings beyond latent construct models.Communications psychology · 2025Article
- The Israeli Face Database (IFD): A multi-ethnic database of faces with supporting social norming data.Behavior research methods · 2025Article
- The Theory of Constructed Emotion: More Than a Feeling.Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2025Article
46 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
It is widely believed that certain emotions are universally recognized in facial expressions. Recent evidence indicates that Western perceptions (e.g., scowls as anger) depend on cues to U.S. emotion concepts embedded in experiments. Because such cues are standard features in methods used in cross-cultural experiments, we hypothesized that evidence of universality depends on this conceptual context. In our study, participants from the United States and the Himba ethnic group from the Keunene region of northwestern Namibia sorted images of posed facial expressions into piles by emotion type. Without cues to emotion concepts, Himba participants did not show the presumed "universal" pattern, whereas U.S. participants produced a pattern with presumed universal features. With cues to emotion concepts, participants in both cultures produced sorts that were closer to the presumed "universal" pattern, although substantial cultural variation persisted. Our findings indicate that perceptions of emotion are not universal, but depend on cultural and conceptual contexts.
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What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.