Conference poster, SAS 2022: Friendship orientation and contextual influences on judgments of facial expressions in Sweden and the UK

Friendship groups differ around the world with some people socializing in dyads and others in groups. There are also cultural variations in judging facial expressions in context. We examined the relationship between the size of friendship groups and judgments of facial expressions, hypothesizing that larger groups would be associated with greater contextual influences on judgments of facial expressions. Participants in Sweden (n = 253) and the UK (n = 193) reported their interactions with friends over the last 3 months and the number of friends they usually socialize with at the same time. As a measure of contextual influences on judgments of facial expressions, participants evaluated the intensity of emotion felt by a cartoon character surrounded by four persons displaying the same or different facial expressions (Masuda et al., 2008). We found that socializing with more friends at the same time over the last 3 months was associated with greater contextual influences on judgments of happiness, anger, and sadness. In addition, when judging the intensity of anger experienced by the central character, British participants were more influenced by the contextual faces than Swedish participants. Exploratory analyses of contextual influences on judgments of neutral faces revealed similar cross-cultural differences. Overall, the findings suggest that the preference to socialize with larger versus smaller groups of friends affects how we see facial expressions. However, this association may depend on the facial expression and on the method of measuring friendship preferences.