section_path: Characteristics/Ethnicity and culture
section_name: Ethnicity and culture
paragraph_text: Ethnicity and culture
  
  Much research has explored whether the emotion of anger is experienced and expressed differently depending on the culture. Matsumoto (2007) conducted a study in which White-American and Asian participants needed to express the emotions from a program called JACFEE (Japanese and Caucasian Facial Expression of Emotion) in order to determine whether Caucasian observers noticed any differences in expression of participants of a different nationality. He found that participants were unable to assign a nationality to people demonstrating expression of anger, i.e. they could not distinguish ethnic-specific expressions of anger. Hatfield, Rapson, and Le (2009) conducted a study that measured ethnic differences in emotional expression using participants from the Philippines, Hawaii, China, and Europe. They concluded that there was a difference between how someone expresses an emotion, especially the emotion of anger in people with different ethnicities, based on frequency, with Europeans showing the lowest frequency of expression of negative emotions.
  
  Other research investigates anger within different ethnic groups who live in the same country. Researchers explored whether Black Americans experience and express greater anger than Whites (Mabry & Kiecolt, 2005). They found that, after controlling for sex and age, Black participants did not feel or express more anger than Whites. Deffenbacher and Swaim (1999) compared the expression of anger in Mexican American people and White non-Hispanic American people. They concluded that White non-Hispanic Americans expressed more verbal aggression than Mexican Americans, although when it came to physical aggression expressions there was no significant difference between both cultures when it came to anger.