Emotional expressions on the face and body: Cross-culturally relevant tools and techniques

The face and body are two central channels by which human beings communicate emotions to one another. Across cultural contexts, scholars have investigated facial and bodily expressions of emotion, both at the levels of production (i.e., how people express themselves when they experience emotions) and perception (i.e., how people make sense of others’ emotional expressions). In this chapter, we provide an overview of recent advances on cross-cultural similarities and differences in emotion expression, organized around specific research methods. We highlight three main ways through which emotional expressions have been investigated cross-culturally: (1) the people as reporters approach, where respondents indicate their emotional expressions via a medium, (2) the people as enactors approach, where expressors’ facial and bodily actions are directly recorded, and (3) the people as judges approach, where participants observe others’ expressions and match them to emotion terms. This chapter seeks to provide a resource for researchers aiming to understand how emotional expressions are typically studied across cultures, what the general findings in this area point to, and which open questions remain.