Although research has generated a wealth of information on cultural influences on emotion judgements, the information we have to date is limited in several ways. This study extends this literature in two ways, first by obtaining judgements from people in two cultures of expressions portrayed at different intensity levels, and second by incorporating individual level measures of culture to examine their contribution to observed differences. When judging emotion categories in low intensity expressions, American and Japanese judges see the emotion intended at above-chance rates, albeit lower than when judging high intensity faces. Also, American and Japanese intensity ratings of external displays and internal experiences differ dramatically for low intensity expressions compared to high intensity faces. Finally, the two cultural dimensions measured in this study—individualism versus collectivism (IC) and status differentiation (SD)—accounted for almost all of the variance in the observed differences. These findings are discussed in terms of their underlying possible mechanisms, and future research possibilities.

Recently, Matsumoto et al. (Int. J. Intercultural Relations (2001) 1) reported the development of a new scale that can measure intercultural adjustment potential (the ICAPS). This article reports six studies that provide further evidence for the reliability and validity of the ICAPS to do so. Although originally developed for use with Japanese sojourners and immigrants, we report data that extend those findings to samples in other cultures as well. Similarities in the findings across cultural samples suggest the existence of a pancultural core of psychological constructs that may be necessary for intercultural adjustment.

We describe the creation and development of a measure that predicts intercultural adjustment potential in Japanese sojourners and immigrants to the US, which we call the ICAPS. We report eight studies that provide evidence for its internal, temporal, and parallel forms reliability; for its predictive ability with not only subjective indices of adjustment, but also with psychometrically standardized measures, peer ratings, and expert ratings; for its convergent validity with a similar measure; for its construct validity with various personality scales; for its incremental validity; and for its external validity in predicting changes as a result of intercultural training, and in identifying experts who work in the intercultural field. We discuss the implications of the availability of this measure to the field for training, research, and education.

In this article, we report the development of a new test designed to measure individual differences in emotion recognition ability (ERA), five studies examining the reliability and validity of the scores produced using this test, and the first evidence for a correlation between ERA measured by a standardized test and personality. Utilizing Matsumoto and Ekman's (1988) Japanese and Caucasian Facial Expressions of Emotion (JACFEE) and Neutral Faces (JACNeuF), we call this measure the Japanese and Caucasian Brief Affect Recognition Test (JACBART). The JACBART improves on previous measures of ERA by (1) using expressions that have substantial validity and reliability data associated with them, (2) including posers of two visibly different races (3) balanced across seven universal emotions (4) with equal distribution of poser race and sex across emotions (5) in a format that eliminates afterimages associated with fast exposures. Scores derived using the JACBART are reliable, and three studies demonstrated a correlation between ERA and the personality constructs of Openness and Conscientiousness, while one study reports a correlation with Extraversion and Neuroticism.

The presented study investigated the dynamic aspects of facial movements in spontaneously elicited and posed facial expressions of emotion. We recorded participants' facial movements when they were shown a set of emotional eliciting films, and when they posed typical facial expressions. Those facial movements were recorded by a high-speed camera of 250 frames per second. We measured facial movements frame by frame in terms of displacements of facial feature points. Such micro-temporal analysis showed that, although it was very subtle, there exits the characteristic onset asynchrony of each part's movement. Furthermore, it was found the commonality of each part's movement in temporal change although the speed and the amount of each movement varied along with expressional conditions and emotions