Most research on cross-cultural emotion recognition has focused on facial expressions. To integrate the body of evidence on vocal expression, we present a meta-analysis of 37 cross-cultural studies of emotion recognition from speech prosody and nonlinguistic vocalizations, including expressers from 26 cultural groups and perceivers from 44 different cultures. Results showed that a wide variety of positive and negative emotions could be recognized with above-chance accuracy in cross-cultural conditions. However, there was also evidence for in-group advantage with higher accuracy in within- versus cross-cultural conditions. The distance between expresser and perceiver culture, measured via Hofstede’s cultural dimensions, was negatively correlated with recognition accuracy and positively correlated with in-group advantage. Results are discussed in relation to the dialect theory of emotion.
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