Emotion & Culture Lab Zhejiang University
浙江大学 · Zhejiang University

Emotion & Culture Lab

Understanding emotion across expressions and cultures.

At Zhejiang University, we study how people express and perceive emotion — across faces, voices, bodies, and the arts — and how culture shapes every step of that process.

Read our research Meet the lab
A single human face divided into six tiles, each showing a different emotional expression

Welcome to the Emotion and Culture Lab!

We focus on the fascinating intersection of emotion science and cross-cultural psychology. We delve into how individuals express and perceive emotions through various channels — including bodily signals such as facial expressions, vocalizations, and body movements, as well as artistic forms like music, film, and painting. Furthermore, we investigate how cultural backgrounds — particularly those of East Asian and North American / Western European cultures — influence these emotional communication processes.

If you’re passionate about understanding how emotion and culture intertwine across various forms of expression, we invite you to join us!

Research Interests & Fields

We investigate emotion expression, emotion perception, and how culture shapes these processes — as well as how emotion affects social cognition and behaviour — by combining methods such as facial-movement analysis, eye tracking, and mouse tracking with statistical approaches including multi-level modelling, Bayesian methods, and machine learning. The emotion channels we examine include facial expressions, vocal bursts, and speech prosody, as well as the arts (music, painting, dance, and more).

Emotional Science

  • Static / dynamic facial expression generation and perception
  • Spontaneous expressions and performance expressions
  • Emotional speech production and perception
  • Emotion production and perception across artistic forms (music, painting, dance…)
  • Emotion experience induced by different artistic forms
  • Emotion regulation
  • The influence of emotion on basic and social cognitive processes

Cross-cultural Comparison

  • Similarities and differences of emotional processes across cultures