Language, Culture, and Emotion Discrimination

Behaving appropriately in social situations requires the ability to discriminate emotional cues (facial or verbal) accurately. This research examined differences in discrimination of emotions due to age and culture, using the Diagnostic Analysis of Nonverbal Behavior (DANVA2), which consists of four subsets of tests with faces and voices of adults and children. A total of 102 subjects participated in the study. Subjects were college students and senior volunteers in Morehead, Kentucky and South Korea. Subjects were required to select the facial or voice expression that represented one of four emotional categories: happy, sad, angry, or fearful. Emotional accuracy decreased with age: performance of the elderly population was poorer than that of college students in both cultures. Findings suggest that the ability to discriminate emotions varies with age, the nature of the emotional stimuli (sensory modality and emotional category), and language ability.