Anger and Disgust Across Borders: Socio-functional Links to Moral Punishments in Western, East Asian, and Cross-Cultural Contexts
Moral anger and disgust are hypothesized to serve distinct adaptive functions in regulating social interactions, yet whether these functional patterns transcend cultural variation in social norms remains theoretically contested. Building on Western evidence that anger motivates confrontational responses while disgust favors indirect, relational strategies, we tested the cross-cultural generality of this divergence in an East Asian, high-context environment. Two large-scale studies in Japan (N > 2,100) reveal robust functional stability: anger consistently predicts both direct and indirect punitive intentions, whereas disgust uniquely predicts indirect social sanctioning—consistent with its evolutionary role in cost avoidance, exclusion, and reputational punishment. However, functional stability
within cultures does not guarantee accurate emotion perception across cultures. We examine this through a Dutch–Japanese vocalization-perception study (N > 2,000) testing how anger and disgust signals are interpreted within and across cultural boundaries. This addresses a fundamental evolutionary challenge: accurately decoding moral emotions expressed through culturally divergent signaling systems. Additionally, we present the Sino–US Moral Nonverbal Expression (SUMNEx) corpus, a new standardized database capturing anger and disgust nonverbal vocalizations from Western and East Asian contexts, designed to support systematic comparative research on moral emotion signaling. Together, these projects reveal how evolved emotional functions interact with cultural
norms to shape punishment decisions and social inference across societies. The findings illuminate the mechanisms through which moral emotions maintain behavioral stability within cultures while their nonverbal expression navigates—or fails to navigate—the interpretive demands of cross-cultural interaction.