If you travel to a foreign country, reading the local paper might not be your only problem; reading the locals can cause mix-ups too. Just as languages have different dialects, there are dialects of emotional expression, according to Hillary Elfenbein of the University of California at Berkeley.
"By and large we understand each other, but there are just little ways in which we get tripped up," Elfenbein says. Her interest in the topic began when she was a management consultant: "My colleagues were having a hard time with signals among people from different backgrounds—signals as basic as whether it was their turn to speak in a meeting."
In a paper in Emotion, she put her dialect theory to the test by comparing French speakers in Quebec and the African nation of Gabon. Experts coded the facial muscles used while expressing 10 emotions and found subtle differences. Reflexive responses like fear and disgust—presumably the most immune to cultural influences—showed the least regional variation, while serenity, contempt, sadness, happiness, shame, and anger showed the most. And in tests of recognition—on average, in-group members have about a 10 percent accuracy advantage—the expressions with the greatest cross-cultural differences proved the hardest for outsiders to interpret.
