Cultural Influences on the Perception of Emotion

Previous cross-cultural research on the emotions have operationalized culture by country. This article suggests that the use of stable and meaningful dimensions of cultural variability, such as those offered by Hofstede (1980), may be useful in studies on emotion. To illustrate their potential usefulness, cultural differences in previous judgment studies of universal facial expressions were reanalyzed, using Hofstede's (1980, 1983) dimensions. The results indicated that meaningful dimensions of cultural variability can be a potentially useful theoretical and empirical construct in future cross-cultural research on the emotions.