Moral expressions in Hong Kong, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom: Cultural similarities and differences in how affective facial muscle activity predicts judgments.

How does facial muscle activity relate to moral judgments across cultures? To explore this question, we used facial electromyography (EMG) among residents of New Zealand (N = 30) and Hong Kong (N = 40), comparing findings to prior data from the United Kingdom. We recorded EMG involved in expressions of disgust (m.levator labii), anger (m.corrugator supercilii), amusement (m.zygomaticus major), and surprise (m.medial frontalis) while participants thought about 90 scenarios that varied in valence and relevance to the harm, fairness, ingroup, authority, and purity moral dimensions. Overall, levator and corrugator activity were associated with more negative judgments in all samples, while only in Hong Kong a decrease in medial frontalis activity was associated with negativity. Both levator and corrugator were cross-culturally associated with negative judgments in purity scenarios. In contrast to prior findings, harm and fairness violations were associated with different levator and/or corrugator activity across samples. We discuss implications for the relationship between spontaneous facial muscle activity and moral versus negativity judgments across cultures. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

A Sense of Obligation: Cultural Differences in the Experience of Obligation.

In this investigation of cultural differences in the experience of obligation, we distinguish between Confucian Role Ethics versus Relative Autonomy lay theories of motivation and illustrate them with data showing relevant cultural differences in both social judgments and intrapersonal experience. First, when judging others, Western European heritage culture (WEHC) participants (relative to Confucian heritage culture [CHC] participants) judged obligation-motivated actors more negatively than those motivated by agency (Study 1, N = 529). Second, in daily diary and situation sampling studies, CHC participants (relative to WEHC participants) perceived more congruency between their own agentic and obligated motivations, and more positive emotional associations with obligated motivations (Study 2, N = 200 and Study 3, N = 244). Agentic motivation, however, was universally associated with positive emotions. More research on a Role Ethics rather than Relative Autonomy conception of agency may improve our understanding of human motivation, especially across cultures.