Reading emotions

Do Australian people express emotions in much the same way as Chinese people? Or are there distinct patterns in styles of communicating and interpreting emotion, as different as languages?

Major variations do exist, but they are more comparable to dialects than to languages. So psychologists call them 'emotional dialects'.

Emotions are the same in Sydney as in Shanghai because they are grounded in biology - or so the prevailing wisdom goes. But the processes of learning to control emotions, express them and perceive them in others are subject to local cultural conditions.

Some argue there is a universal quality to broad dimensions of emotion - such as arousal and valence (feelings of attraction or aversion). These are distinct from more specific emotional categories, such as anger and surprise, which are probably the most susceptible to cultural variation.

The most basic facial expressions of emotion are anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness and surprise, say psychologists who reviewed research covering 42 countries and 23 ethnic groups. The most easily recognised across cultures are happiness (especially in the face) and anger (especially in the voice). This could be because recognising happiness and anger shows a healthy, naturally selected attunement to signals of approachability and avoidance.

There are odd exceptions. The Bahinemo people of New Guinean, for instance, were studied at a time when they had had no previous contact with westerners. They saw all American faces as angry.

In regional terms, Europeans and Americans are better at recognising American expressions of emotions than are Asians or Africans. But why is this? Is it a matter of cultural learning, expressive style, differences in emotional concepts, cognitive representations?