An enculturation-induced joy bias for emotion recognition in full-body-movement.

ABSTRACT: While emotional expression via the body is universal across cultures, labelling emotions into 'emotion-word' categories is not universal, but learned-especially in the West. Based on previous work using Western expressive gestures, we designed a video-stimuli library with emotionally expressive gestures from a non-WEIRD cultural tradition, which our participants had different levels of enculturation with. Stimuli consisted of 6-s-long sequences of Iranian social dance gestures, danced five-times each with different emotional expressivities, so that the same movement trajectories were used to express five 'basic' emotions (anger, fear, joy, sadness, neutrality). Across two experiments with 200 Iranian, English, and Southeast Asian participants (one pre-registered), we tested how enculturati

SUBMITTER: Christensen JF 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12549998 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature