Emotional Aperture Across East and West: How Culture Shapes the Perception of Collective Affect

Quickly and accurately recognizing emotional cues in a collective, referred to as emotional aperture, has been posited to be important for navigating social contexts. This ability, therefore, may be particularly strong among those who live within culturally situated collectivist contexts. In this research, we examined evidence for this variability in recognizing collective emotions across cultures by comparing Chinese and Americans’ performance on an emotional aperture task. We found that Chinese were indeed more accurate in recognizing collective emotions as compared with Americans. This was mediated by cultural variability in global (vs. local) processing. We discuss how these findings contribute to our understanding of culture and collective emotion perception