Cross-cultural and inter-group research on emotion perception

The face plays an important role in communicating emotions. We constantly find ourselves reading others’ faces on different occasions, such as in the office and in school as well as in the bar and in the bedroom, to gain knowledge about others’ feelings, thoughts, and intentions, and improve our social interactions (Ekman, 1992; Frijda et al., 1989; Van Kleef, 2009). However, accurately decoding emotion expressions is not always easy, and it may become even more challenging when we interpret displays of people from another cultural, ethnic, or social group. In this paper, we first provide a brief overview of research on perceptions of emotional facial expressions from both the cross-cultural and intergroup perspectives, summarizing three distinct phenomena/mechanisms in each domain. Second, we introduce four articles in this special issue that address an array of questions in the broad area of emotion perception, ranging from perceptions of emotion expressions displayed by members of own- vs. other- social groups to children’s emotion understanding across cultures.