Ethnic bias in the recognition of facial expressions

Ethnic bias in the recognition of facial expressions was assessed by having college students from the United States and Zambia assign emotion labels to facial expressions produced by imitation by United States and Zambian students. Bidirectional ethnic bias was revealed by the fact that Zambian raters labeled the Zambian facial expressions with less uncertainty than the U.S. facial expressions, and that U.S. raters labeled the U.S. facial expressions with less uncertainty than the Zambian facial expressions. In addition, the Facial Action Coding System was used to assess accuracy in the imitation of facial expressions. These results and the results of other analyses of recognition accuracy are reported.Portions of this paper were presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Cross-Cultural Research, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, February 1980 (Note 1).