By: Andrew Grenville, Chief Research Officer – Vision Critical

Part Of Series: Questions & Answers: On the Art and Science of Survey Research

Emotions play a powerful role in consumer choice. Researchers and marketers are coming to understand this more and more and, as a result, many people are trying to measure feelings. A lot of market researchers are using images of facial expressions to capture emotions. Some do it with cute little cartoon characters, others with pictures of actors. But all are assuming that these facial expressions have the same meaning for everyone, an assumption that is wrong.

The bottom line: facial expressions add confusion. Use words when measuring feelings.

But don’t take my word for it. Let’s look at some of the evidence. “Cultural Confusions Show that Facial Expressions are Not Universal” is the title of one such recent study, which pretty much says it all, except that the how and why of this confusion is fascinating.

The researchers who wrote this “Cultural Confusions” paper used a sample of people living in Scotland, some of whom were of “East Asian” heritage and others who were of “Western Caucasian” background. They found that the East Asians were unable to distinguish reliably between the facial expressions fear and disgust, while the Western Caucasians could. The difference, they discovered, can be attributed to the fact that East Asians look at faces differently than do the Western Caucasians—the East Asians tended to focus on the eyes and missed some of the other cues. But this recent single study is just one piece of the puzzle.

“Emotional expressions may lose some of their meaning across cultural boundaries” concluded a meta-analysis of 182 studies in 43 different nations and 23 ethnic groups. Using the careful language of science, they “found evidence that emotions may be more accurately understood when they are judged by members of the same nation, ethnic or regional group that expressed the emotion”. Their theory as to why this is intriguing.

They suggest “similar to linguistic dialects, the basic human language of emotional expression may have dialects that differ in the style of expression and interpretation”. A follow-up study of different ethnic groups in Canada found people were also more accurate at recognising expressions by members of their own ethnic groups. This obviously is a problem we need to be aware of, not only in cross-national studies, but also within multi-cultural countries like Canada, France, Australia, the US and the UK.

Let’s leave the final word to Robert Plutchik, a renowned researcher whose model of emotions is the one we use at Vision Critical. He concludes “facial expressions are imperfect communicators of emotional states. Emotions and facial expressions are only partially related and the connections between the two classes of events are subject to many disrupting influences.”

The bottom line: facial expressions add confusion. Use words when measuring feelings.

Readings

• Jack et al. Cultural Confusions Show that Facial Expressions are Not Universal, Current Biology 19, 1-6, Sept 29, 2009
• Elfenbein and Ambady. On the Universality and Cultural Specificity of Emotion Recognition: A Meta-Analysis, Psychological Bulletin Vol. 128, No. 2, 203-235, 2002
• Beaupré and Hess. Cross-Cultural Emotion Recognition Among Canadian Ethnic Groups, Journal of Cross Cultural Psychology, Vol. 36, No. 3, 355-370, May 2005
• Robert Plutchik. Emotions and Life: Perspectives from Psychology, Biology and Evolution, American Psychological Association, Washington DC, 2003

Previous Posts In this Series:

Don’t Ask Why The Answer Is Not What You Think It Is