Context Differences Or Cultural Similarities:a Cross-cultural Study Investigating The Recognition Of Facial Emotion Based On Two Different Stimulating Presentations Between Chinese And Caucasian Students

The evidence of Cross-cultural research on facial expression recognition had been accumulated for decades, the context effect had being of great cross-cultural value for the field of facial expression recognition. Many scholars from China or abroad had already did lots of research about context effect of facial expression recognition. Due to the development of economic globalization, interracial communication is becoming more and more frequent between countries all over the world. If we want to communicate with the people from other countries for work or academic interaction, we should learn to identify facial expressions correctly, which is the foundation of our interpersonal communication. In this paper, from the perspective of context effect, combined with the previous research about context effect, we investigated the sensitivity to the context clues of two different racial participants identifying facial expression; we tried to find out whether different stimulus presentations can lead to different results, and discussed the advantages and disadvantages of two different presentations. We also seek to use advanced eye tracker technology to explore the eye movement patterns and motion trajectories of facial expression recognition under two different presentations. In addition, this research may powerfully supplement the current facial expression recognition research.This study had three experiments. Experiment1was the simultaneous presentation. It was to find out whether the Chinese people were more easily affected by contextual cues, compared to American Caucasians. Experiment2was the sequential presentation. It was to examine whether Caucasian Americans were less likely than the Chinese counterparts to be sensitive to contextual information. Taking Chinese subjects as an example, experiment3aimed to find out the differences of saccadic mode when participants processing the context clues, under two different stimulus presentations. Experiment3also made further exploration on the reasons why two different stimulus presentations led to different context sensitivity.The results were as follows:1) In the simultaneous presentation, the reaction time of the native Chinese students were longer, so we can infer that Chinese participants were more likely affected by contextual faces; native Caucasian students’ reaction time were shorter, heralding the Caucasian subjects were less affected by the context effect; in statistics, the difference between them was extremely significant, namely, native Chinese students were more apparently impacted by context effect, compared to native Caucasian students.2) In the sequential presentation, native Chinese students had a longer reaction time, and the native Caucasian students had relatively short reaction time. The reaction time of native Chinese students and that of native Caucasian students had the remarkable difference in statistics. We can infer that Chinese subjects were more easily influenced by contextual faces than the Caucasus subjects.3) The main effect of racial participants was extremely significant. The average reaction time of all the native Chinese students from Experiment1and Experiment2was longer than the native Caucasian students’ reaction time, showing that the native Chinese students had a stronger sensitivity to the contextual factors than the native Caucasian students. The main effect of two different stimulus presentations had a marginal difference in statistics; as to the average reaction time of two experiment presentations, it indicated the average reaction time of all the subjects in the sequential presentation was longer than simultaneous presentation.4) We analyzed the9eye movement indicators. The results showed that the average reaction time of remaining indicators were longer in sequential presentation than that in simultaneous presentation, besides the average fixation duration. Among the9eye movement indicators, the ia-average fixation pupil size, ia-fixation count, average saccade amplitude, ia-fixation run count in simultaneous presentation were remarkable significant than that in sequential presentation.5) Synthesizing the result of the eye patterns and behavioral data, we found that the average fixation duration in sequential presentation was longer, but the interest area fixation duration in sequential presentation was at lower level; So by that reckoning, because the contextual faces was presented before the target facial expression, there may be a time lag attenuated the context effect on the reaction speeds of the judgment of the target’s facial expression. Additionally, cognitive processing energy conservation also exists in two stimulus presentation paradigms, so we think, using the simultaneous presentation, we can get a better investigation of context effect of facial expression recognition, however, each of the two stimulus presentation paradigm had advantages and disadvantages. Since the two separate presentation was not a ideal paradigm to examine context effect, it can get a comprehensive inspection, if combined with other paradigms.