[The mutual interference of facial and vocal information in Chinese and Japanese people's perception of emotions].

In this study, we investigated cultural differences in multisensory perception of emotion between Chinese and Japanese participants, focusing on mutual interference of visual and auditory emotional information. In this experiment, the face-voice pairs were consisted of congruent or incongruent emotions (e.g., a happy (an angry) face with a happy (an angry) voice in congruent pairs, and a happy (an angry) face with an angry (a happy) voice in incongruent pairs). Participants were asked to judge the emotion of targets focusing on either face or voice while ignoring the other modality's information. In the voice-focus condition, the effect of to-be-ignored facial information was smaller in Japanese than Chinese participants, only when the participant and the target belonged to the same cultures (in-group). This indicated that Japanese people were more likely to be based on the voice information in multisensory perception of emotion of in-group. Our study illuminated that although both Japanese and Chinese people belonged to the Eastern culture, there were cultural differences in perceiving emotion from visual and auditory cues.

[Effects of smiling manipulation on negative cognitive process during self-focused attention].

The experiment was conducted to investigate the effects of smiling expression on cognitive and emotional processes during the introduction of negative mood and cognition by self-focused attention. The mechanisms underlying such effects were also examined, with reference to Interacting Cognitive Subsystems framework (Teasdale & Barnard, 1993). We induced the self-focused attention for all 33 participants but the timing and type of facial expressions manipulated differed among three conditions: control condition (required to move the facial muscles which are unrelated with smiling), buffer condition (required to "smile" before the self-focused attention), and attenuation condition (required to "smile" after the self-focused attention). The results showed that the negative mood was increased in the control group while it was decreased in two experimental groups. Furthermore, the positive mood was decreased in the control group, and increased in the buffer group. The contents of spontaneous thought during experiment were more positive among two "smile" conditions than control condition. These results suggest the importance of smiling before and during negative self-focused attention.

Cross-cultural discrepancies in self-appraisals.

Two studies examined self-appraisals in Japanese and Canadian samples. Study 1 included open-ended self-descriptions; Study 2 incorporated indirect measures of self-enhancing tendencies. In Study 1, the content analysis assessed spontaneous evaluations of self and others, private and relational self-statements, reflected appraisals, temporal and social comparisons, and evaluations of objects and events. Canadian participants typically provided self-enhancing self-descriptions. Japanese participants were generally evenhanded rather than self-critical or self-enhancing, although they were more favorable about relational than private aspects of self. In Study 2, Canadian participants reported that proud events felt closer in time and were easier to recall than similarly distant embarrassing events. Japanese participants reported that embarrassing and proud events felt equally far away and were equally memorable. The two studies provide evidence that Canadians possess stronger self-enhancing motivations than do Japanese and enable a cross-cultural analysis of several social psychological theories of self-appraisal.