Culture shapes how we feel, not how we express: A cross-cultural study of emotional experience and expression

Emotional experiences vary with culture, age, and sex, but whether such differences extend to expressions remains unclear. We tested 7,633 participants from 16 countries who privately watched silent, emotionally evocative videos. Participants reported their experiences using 48 categories while webcams recorded facial reactions, which we analyzed with a dynamic machine learning model. Participants from culturally adjacent regions reported similar emotional experiences, with clear differences between culturally disparate regions such as South America, Asia, and Europe. People’s emotional experiences became more similar with age among peers but differed across generations. Women and men reported similar experiences, particularly among older groups. In contrast, the average facial expressions evoked when people reported the same experience were highly consistent across countries, sexes, and ages. Together, these findings indicate that while emotional experience is shaped by cultural and demographic factors, facial expression remains relatively conserved across populations, suggesting a shared structure for how emotions are displayed even when they are experienced differently.