Reading focus
Syllabus: How Do Culture and Emotion Shape Each Other?
Identify how the stories, selected photographs and response alternatives define agreement in this study.
Why you’re reading it. Understand the evidential basis of an influential universality argument before evaluating a different way of asking the question.
A question to consider. What conclusion would remain justified if participants matched the supplied story successfully but described the same face differently without a story?
Why this reading
Ekman and Friesen investigate whether people with limited exposure to Western media connect facial photographs with similar emotional situations. The study makes a historically important universality claim concrete enough to examine its design and alternatives.
Before you read
In a forced-choice task, participants select among supplied alternatives. Here adults heard a story and chose among three photographs; children chose between two. Agreement on this task differs from identifying emotions spontaneously in everyday encounters.
Read for
- Examine the participant-selection criteria, translated stories and prior selection of facial photographs.
- Distinguish the pattern of agreement from the fear–surprise difficulty and from the proposed explanations of universality.
Consider afterwards
- How might changing the stories or alternative photographs change the meaning of a correct response?
- What evidence would distinguish common learning experiences from an inherited facial-emotion association?
Editorial context
The study concerns sampled South Fore communities in what is now Papua New Guinea. Its historical terminology should not be adopted as a hierarchy of cultures. The authors explicitly allow cultural differences in eliciting situations, consequences and display rules. Later research by Gendron and colleagues shows why response formats and emotion labels matter to universality claims. That study uses a different population and task; it is not an exact replication. Photograph choices alone do not establish a universal one-to-one mapping between a face and an internal feeling.