LETTER

Commonalities outweigh differencesin the communication of emotions
across human cultures
In a recent study, Jack et al. (1) examined the perception ofemotional facial expressions using reverse correlations of viewers’
classiﬁcations of randomly generated muscle movements. The
authors argued that their ﬁndings refute the notion that facial
expressions of emotions are shared across human cultures. The
reverse-correlation approach is an interesting contribution to thecross-cultural study of emotional communication. However, thestrong claim of refutation is not supported by their data.
Before evaluating cross-cultural differences, it is important toconsider whether the methodology provides a reliable measureof established facial emotional conﬁgurations within frequently
studied populations. Previous work with a Caucasian sample
found correlations from 0.32 to 0.91 between the results of reverse-correlation analysis and established facial actions (2). Thisﬁnding suggests that, although the measure is good for someemotions, this method is imperfect even in the “baseline” case of
Caucasian Europeans. Explanations for the variability may bethat randomly varying movement parameters fail to account forthe fact that viewers perceive emotional facial expressions conﬁgurally, rather than by processing facial movements independently (3), and that dynamic cues—such as order, synchrony, andspeed—matter (4).
The authors argued that, according to the universality hypothesis, six emotions should form distinct clusters, because
these are cross-culturally expressed using different combinationsof facial movements. Although their statistical analysis found
an optimal solution with fewer than six clusters in the East Asian(EA) group, Fig. 2 in the article appears to show that, with theexception of fear in the EA group, each emotion was judged
on the basis of a different constellation of facial muscle movements in both groups. This result ﬁts well with the establishedﬁnding that emotional facial expressions are largely consistentacross cultures (see ref. 5 for a meta-analysis).

E180 | PNAS | January 15, 2013 | vol. 110 | no. 3

However, there is generally less speciﬁcity in the EA data.
Several potential factors may underlie this lack of speciﬁcity.
Because the Chinese “cultural group” includes many culturaland linguistic subgroups, variability even for in-group signals
should be expected, because perceivers are more sensitive toemotional signals from in-group members (5). More variability isalso expected for out-group recognition by EA participants because of levels of cross-cultural exposure, as there are fewer
Caucasians in most parts of China than there are Chinese inmany parts of the United Kingdom. Finally, the classiﬁcation task
relied on participants’ understanding of English emotion terms,
which may have been more variable in the EA sample because ofvarying lexical correspondence to English emotion terms acrossChinese languages, as well as varying English proﬁciency.
Neither previous studies nor the data presented herein havefound major disagreements between cultures in their judgmentsof emotional expressions. The pattern of broad agreement andsmall differences has consistently been found across manystudies, and is already incorporated into leading “universalist”
accounts (5). Consequently, Jack et al.’s results do not refute“universalist” accounts of emotional communication, although
their data provide a contribution to the study of consistencies
and differences in the perception of speciﬁc emotional
facial cues.
Disa A. Sautera,1 and Frank Eisnerb
aDepartment of Social Psychology, University of Amsterdam, 1018
XA Amsterdam, The Netherlands; and bAdaptive Listening Group,
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, 6500 AH Nijmegen, TheNetherlands
1. Jack RE, Garrod OGB, Yu H, Caldara R, Schyns PG (2012) Facial expressions of emotion
are not culturally universal. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 109(19):7241–7244.
2. Yu H, Garrod OGB, Schyns PG (2012) Perception-driven facial expression synthesis.
Comput Graph 36(3):152–162.
3. Calder AJ, Young AW, Keane J, Dean M (2000) Conﬁgural information in facial
expression perception. J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform 26(2):527–551.
4. Krumhuber EG, Scherer KR (2011) Affect bursts: Dynamic patterns of facial expression.
Emotion 11(4):825–841.
5. Elfenbein HA, Ambady N (2002) On the universality and cultural speciﬁcity of emotion
recognition: A meta-analysis. Psychol Bull 128(2):203–235.

Author contributions: D.A.S. and F.E. wrote the paper.
The authors declare no conﬂict of interest.
1To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: d.a.sauter@uva.nl.

www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1209522110