Culture and facial expression: Open-ended methods find more expressions and a gradient of recognition

We used multiple methods to examine two questions about emotion and culture : (1) Which facial expressions are recognised cross-culturally; and (2) doe s the "forced-choice" method lead to spurious findings of universality? For ty participants in the US and 40 in India were shown 14 facial expressions and asked to say what had happened to cause the person to make the face. An alyses of the social situations given and of the affect words spontaneously used showed high levels of recognition for most of the expressions. A subs equent forced-choice task using the same faces confirmed these findings. An alysis of the pattern of magnitude, discreteness, and similarity of respons es across cultures and expressions led to the conclusion that there is no n eat distinction between cross-culturally recognisable and nonrecognisable e xpressions. Results are better described as a gradient of recognition.