Shyness makes facial expressions seem more intense, but only in certain cultures

People with higher levels of shyness tend to perceive other people’s facial expressions as more intense, but this effect appears to depend heavily on their cultural background. A recent study found that shyness heightens the perceived intensity of emotions among young adults in Mainland China, but the same pattern does not appear in Canadian populations. The research, published in Psychological Reports, suggests that cultural rules about how we display our feelings play a major role in how personality shapes our perception of others.

Emotions are a universal human experience, but the way we display and interpret them depends on where we grow up. In Western societies, expressing emotions openly and directly is generally encouraged. In contrast, many East Asian societies place a higher value on social harmony, which often translates to more subdued emotional displays. This idea is supported by a variety of prior studies. For example, a 2016 review noted that people in Western cultures tend to experience and value high-energy emotions, while people in Eastern cultures tend to prefer and experience calmer, lower-energy emotional states.

Because emotional displays are more restrained in collectivist cultures, individuals in these environments might learn to pay closer attention to subtle changes in facial expressions. This cultural tuning can even be seen at the neural level. For instance, a study covered by PsyPost in 2024 found that simply hearing an emotion word changed how the brains of Chinese immigrants processed facial expressions, while having no such effect on the brains of White American participants.

Beyond cultural background, individual personality traits also influence how we read faces. Shyness is a personality trait characterized by feeling nervous, timid, or self-conscious in social situations. People with high levels of shyness often experience a strong fear of being judged by others, which can cause them to become highly vigilant when navigating social interactions. Prior research hints that shy individuals might overestimate the intensity of negative emotions, seeing them as more threatening than they actually are.

Until now, it was unknown how a person’s shyness and their broader cultural environment might combine to shape how they judge emotional intensity. Emotional intensity refers to the physical strength or energy of a feeling displayed on someone’s face. A slight smile represents a low-intensity emotion, while a wide grin represents a high-intensity emotion. To address this gap, researchers led by Xiaoxue (Sonia) Kong, an assistant professor at the University of Northern British Columbia, and Gabriel (Naiqi) Xiao, an associate professor at McMaster University, set out to see if the link between shyness and emotion perception changes across different cultural contexts.

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“Previous research has shown that both cultural background and individual personality traits can influence how people perceive facial emotions, but very few studies have examined these two factors together,” Kong and Xiao told PsyPost.

“We were particularly interested in shyness because shy individuals may be more sensitive to social and emotional cues and shyness is also a personality trait whose expression and implications can be shaped by culture. So we wanted to bring these two areas together.”

The researchers recruited 160 young adults for their experiment. This included 47 participants living in Mainland China, alongside 59 White participants and 54 East Asian participants living in Canada. The East Asian Canadian group primarily consisted of individuals originally from regions like Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan who had been living in Canada for four to ten years.

To measure shyness, the participants completed a widely used questionnaire that asked them to rate how strongly they agreed with statements about feeling nervous or tense in social settings. Next, the participants completed a computer-based emotion perception task.

During this task, participants looked at photographs of faces expressing happiness, sadness, anger, fear, or a neutral state. To prevent the participants from struggling to read the faces of people from unfamiliar backgrounds, the researchers only showed faces that matched the participant’s own racial group. The researchers used specialized software to blend emotional faces with neutral faces, creating five specific levels of emotional intensity: zero percent, 25 percent, 50 percent, 75 percent, and 100 percent. Each face appeared on the screen for a brief moment, and the participants then used a sliding scale from zero to 100 to rate how intense the emotion looked.

When analyzing the results, the researchers found that participants across all three groups were generally accurate at tracking emotional intensity. As the physical intensity of the facial expression increased in the photographs, the participants’ intensity ratings reliably increased as well.

However, the participants’ level of shyness had a distinct impact on these ratings depending on their cultural group. Among the participants living in Mainland China, shyness acted as a strong amplifier. The higher a Chinese participant scored on the shyness scale, the more intense they perceived all the facial expressions to be. This heightened sensitivity applied across the board, whether the face was showing a positive emotion like happiness or a negative one like fear.

“One finding that surprised us was that the effect of shyness was not limited to negative emotions,” the researchers explained.

“Previous research has often linked shyness to heightened sensitivity to socially threatening or negative emotional cues, but in our study, shyness was associated with greater perceived emotional intensity more broadly among the Mainland Chinese participants.”

This amplifying effect of shyness was completely absent in both the White Canadian and East Asian Canadian groups. For the participants living in Canada, being highly shy did not change how intensely they rated the facial expressions.

“We included both White Canadian and East Asian Canadian participants, in addition to participants living in Mainland China,” the researchers noted. “The fact that the two Canadian groups showed similar patterns, while the Mainland Chinese group differed, suggests that where people live and the cultural environment they experience may be important alongside ethnic background when we think about personality and emotion perception.”

“The way personality influences our perception of other people’s emotions may depend on the cultural context in which we live,” they added. “This suggests that shyness does not necessarily operate in the same way across cultures.”

The researchers suggest that in Chinese culture, where emotional restraint is the norm, shy individuals might develop an intense sensitivity to subtle facial changes to avoid social missteps. Because they are less exposed to loud or exaggerated emotional displays, they might react more strongly when reading expressions. Their heightened vigilance makes any emotional display register as stronger. In contrast, Western cultures encourage more direct emotional communication, which might reduce the need for shy individuals to be on such high alert. The social costs of misreading a facial expression might simply be lower in a Western environment.

The fact that East Asian Canadians did not show the same pattern as Mainland Chinese participants suggests that they may have adapted to Western communication styles. It is also possible that the varied backgrounds within this immigrant group diluted the cultural effect observed in the Mainland Chinese sample.

As with all research, there are a few things to keep in mind. First, the study relied on static photographs of facial expressions. In real-world social interactions, people express emotions dynamically through moving facial muscles, body language, and tone of voice. A photograph might not fully capture how a shy person reads a shifting emotional situation in everyday life.

The study also focused on three specific groups, which means the results cannot automatically be applied to people from other ethnic or cultural backgrounds. Different societies have their own unique rules about emotional expression, and incorporating a wider variety of global populations could provide a more complete picture of how personality and culture interact.

Additionally, while the study included East Asian Canadians, the researchers did not measure exactly how much these individuals had adopted Canadian cultural norms. Tracking how immigrant populations adapt their social perception over time could offer deeper insights into the way cultural shifts alter emotional processing.

“Our findings should not be interpreted as suggesting that all shy Chinese individuals perceive emotions in a particular way, or that culture alone causes these differences,” the researchers clarified. “Our sample consisted of young adults from three specific groups, and we used static facial expressions in a laboratory setting.”

“Future research with more culturally diverse samples and more naturalistic emotional interactions will be important for determining how broadly these findings generalize,” they concluded.

The study, “Shyness and Facial Emotion Perception: A Cross-Cultural Study,” was authored by Xiaoxue Kong, Wei Fang, Skade Fernando, Naiqi G. Xiao, and Louis A. Schmidt.