Results for Cross-Cultural Comparison

Abstract

This chapter reports the results of perceptual experiments aimed at exploring possible differences in the human ability to identify emotional information. In particular, different groups of Italian, American, French, Hungarian and Lithuanian participants were involved in the assessment of emotional expressions extracted from Italian (a country-specific language) and American English (as a global spread language ) live recording movies scenes. The emotional stimuli are portrayed through the visual , auditory , and audiovisual mode. Results show that the emotional visual information share distinctive features across cultures, allowing similar emotional recognition accuracy among the different cultural groups participating to the experiments whereas the recognition accuracy of vocal emotional expressions is affected by the language specificity .