10.1177/0022022104273656 JOURNAL OF CROSS-CULTURAL PSYCHOLOGY Beaupré, Hess / EMOTION RECOGNITION CROSS-CULTURAL EMOTION RECOGNITION AMONG CANADIAN ETHNIC GROUPS MARTIN G. BEAUPRÉ URSULA HESS University of Quebec at Montreal This study aims to investigate cultural differences in recognition accuracy as well as the in-group advantage hypothesis for emotion recognition among sub-Saharan African, Chinese, and French Canadian individuals living in Canada. The participants viewed expressions of happiness, anger, sadness, fear, disgust, and shame selected from the Montreal Set of Facial Displays of Emotion. These data did not support the in-group advan- tage hypothesis under the condition of stimulus equivalence. However, both encoder and decoder effects were found. Specifically, French Canadians were more accurate for the decoding of expressions of shame and sadness. Moreover, fear expressions were best recognized when shown by sub-Saharan Africans, sug- gesting an effect of salience of expressive cues due to morphological features of the face. Keywords: culture; emotion; recognition; facial expression; in-group advantage; in-group bias Cross-cultural research on emotion recognition has provided evidence for both consider- able pan-cultural similarities as well as cross-cultural differences (e.g., Ekman et al., 1987; Matsumoto, 1993; Matsumoto & Ekman, 1989). One of the explanations for this cross-cul- tural variation has been based on the observation of higher recognition accuracy rates in cases where both the decoder and the encoder belonged to the same cultural group (e.g., Elfenbein & Ambady, 2002a, 2002b; Elfenbein, Mandal, Ambady, Harizuka, & Kumar, 2002; Kilbride & Yarczower, 1983; Markham & Wang, 1996). This tendency for an in-group advantage has recently received meta-analytical support (Elfenbein & Ambady, 2002a, but see also Matsumoto, 2002, for a different perspective). There are a number of reasons why individuals may be generally more accurate at recog- nizing expressions by members of their own ethnic group. First, the advantage may be due to cultural differences in encoding. That is, there may be subtle differences in expressive style between members of different cultural groups that make it more difficult to decode expres- sions by cultural out-group members (e.g., Elfenbein & Ambady, 2002a). Conversely, an in- group advantage may be caused by cultural differences in decoding. For instance, individu- als may use more efficient modes of processing when judging emotion expressions of in- group members, due to such factors as familiarity with facial morphology or even higher motivation to decode expressions by in-group members. 355 AUTHORS’NOTE: This research was supported by a grant from the Fonds pour la Formation des Chercheurs et l’Aide à la Recher- che to Ursula Hess. The writing of this article was facilitated by a scholarship from the Fonds Quebecois de la Recherche sur la Société et la Culture accorded to Martin G. Beaupré. The authors are grateful to Nicole Cheung for her precious help with the data collection and to François Labelle and Pedro Herrera for their valuable help in the creation of the stimuli. They are also very grateful to Hillary Anger Elfenbein for her valuable comments with regard to prior versions of this article. Please address correspondence to Ursula Hess, Department of Psychology, University of Quebec at Montreal, P.O. Box 8888, Station “Centre-ville,” Montreal, Que- bec H3C 3P8, Canada; e-mail: hess.ursula@uqam.ca. JOURNAL OF CROSS-CULTURAL PSYCHOLOGY, Vol. 36 No. 3, May 2005355-370 DOI: 10.1177/0022022104273656 © 2005 Sage Publications