The Role of Regulatory Focus and Emotion Recognition Bias in Cross-Cultural Negotiation

Abstract

Prior research on cross-cultural negotiation has emphasized the cognitive and the behavioral elements. This study takes a different perspective and presents a motivation–emotion model of cross-cultural negotiation. We propose that the cultural differences in chronic regulatory focus will lead to cultural biases in emotion recognition, which in turn will affect negotiation behaviors. People are inclined to perceive and behave in ways that enhance regulatory fit. Westerners and East Asians, who each have different chronic regulatory focus, are likely to interpret the negotiation situation differently in order to increase their regulatory fit. Specifically, this study proposes that when the emotion of the opponent is ambiguous, people from different cultural backgrounds may show cultural biases in emotion recognition, concentrating on the emotion that fits their chronic regulatory focus. Drawing on the Emotion as Social Information (EASI) model, this study discusses how these cultural biases in emotion recognition can affect people’s negotiation behaviors. Finally, some possible moderators of the motivation–emotion model including power and emotion recognition accuracy are suggested to promote sustainable practices in cross-cultural negotiation.

1. Introduction

Negotiation is a deliberate interaction of social units that attempts to determine what each party shall give and receive in the transaction [1,2,3]. Negotiation is especially useful in situations in which people want to reach an agreement without aggression but have no specific rules or procedures to resolve the conflict [2,4]. As with other kinds of social interactions, culture is known to influence negotiation. Research on cross-cultural negotiation has primarily focused on cognitive mechanisms such as conflict frames [5] and cognitive biases [6,7]. For example, American negotiators showed stronger competitive judgment biases including the fixed pie bias [6] and self-serving bias compared to people from other cultures [8,9].

Another stream of research has discovered the role of emotion in negotiation. From the intra-personal perspective of emotion, researchers studied the effect of emotional experience on negotiation, showing that individuals’ decisions are affected by their emotions and mood at the time of decision making [10,11,12,13]. Later studies in this line of research have explored the inter-personal effect of emotion during negotiation including the use of others’ emotions as social information [14,15,16,17]. Our focus on how people use emotion as social information enables us to understand the emotional interaction between the negotiating partners. Moreover, because the inter-personal perspective discusses how people use others’ emotions in deciding their negotiation behaviors, it allows us to explain how cultural biases in emotion recognition can lead to differences in negotiation behaviors. For instance, in emotionally ambiguous situations, Americans and Japanese might perceive the same emotional expression differently; then, Americans and Japanese will each use different emotions in designing their negotiation strategies, and thus show distinctive negotiation behaviors.

We propose that how people recognize or perceive the opponents’ emotions in cross-cultural negotiations can affect negotiation behaviors. When the opponent’s emotion is clear (all of the emotional cues including the facial expression, voice, non-verbal behaviors, and the situational context convey the same emotion), it is likely that participants from different cultures will agree on what the opponent is feeling. However, we believe that when the opponent’s emotion is ambiguous (multiple emotion cues each convey different emotions; e.g., the opponent looks angry, but has a watery, trembling voice), participants from different cultural backgrounds might recognize the opponent’s emotion differently.

In particular, we focus not only on the cultural biases in emotion recognition, but also on the motivational mechanism that drives these biases. Of many motivational theories, we look specifically at cultural differences in chronic regulatory focus to explain the cultural biases in emotion recognition. Regulatory focus has been used extensively in studying persuasion and communication behaviors, because people’s regulatory foci can decide what feels wrong and right to them [18,19,20,21]. When a person’s chronic regulatory focus does not fit the regulatory focus of the situation, the person feels uncomfortable and becomes motivated to perceive and behave in ways that increase regulatory fit [21,22,23].

We extend on this idea and propose that negotiating partners from different cultures, because they have different chronic regulatory focus, will likely recognize the opponent’s emotion in ways that increase regulatory fit. For instance, Americans might experience more sadness when the negotiation is not going well, but Koreans, in the same situation, would recognize Americans’ emotion as anger because such recognition increases the feeling of regulatory fit.

We also hypothesize that even when there is a regulatory fit violation, if the emotional cues of the American negotiator are clear to the Korean negotiator, the Korean negotiator will accept the situation, even though the situation violates his or her regulatory fit. However, if the emotional cues of the American negotiator are ambiguous (with different cues each expressing different emotions), the Korean negotiator might be inclined to interpret the situation in a way that increases regulatory fit by creating an emotion recognition bias. Developing emotion recognition biases to serve a motivational purpose is not uncommon. Previous research suggests that people often show biases in interpersonal perception to serve motivational goals [24,25]. Therefore, in the later sections of the study, we provide a detailed explanation of our prediction that the cultural differences in regulatory focus will cause cultural biases in emotion recognition, which in turn will affect negotiation behaviors.

To sum up, this study presents a conceptual model of cross-cultural negotiation which focuses on how chronic regulatory focus serves as a motivational driver for cultural biases in emotion recognition, which results in different negotiation behaviors. To set a context for this study, we first begin by summarizing past research on cross-cultural negotiation. In the following sections, we attempt to fill in the gaps of current research on cross-cultural negotiation by uncovering the role of motivation and emotion. We first begin by listing the logical flow of this study and use subsequent sections to develop these step by step:

(i)

Cultural differences in chronic regulatory focus will lead to cultural biases in emotion recognition, because people are inclined to behave in ways that increase regulatory fit.

(ii)

Assuming that there are cultural biases in emotion recognition, in emotionally ambiguous situations, people from different cultures will reach different conclusions about the opponent’s emotion. This is because they recognize the same ambiguous emotional expression differently.

(iii)

These conclusions about the opponent’s emotion will be used as social information in negotiations and thus, people may show distinctive negotiation behaviors.

In the final section, we summarize the conclusions of previous sections and propose a motivation–emotion model of cross-cultural negotiation. We also introduce possible moderators of the relationship including power and emotion recognition accuracy for sustainable practices in cross-cultural negotiation.

2. Cross-Cultural Negotiation

Negotiation is a broad topic that has been studied in numerous fields such as psychology, economics, organizational behavior, sociology, and law [2]. An important theoretical distinction has been between normative and descriptive approaches [26]. Normative models, which are tied to theories in economics, assume that people are rational individuals and explain how people should behave in negotiation situations [27,28,29]. Descriptive models, which are closely linked to theories in psychology and organizational behavior, examine the influence of psychological factors on negotiation by looking at how people actually behave [30,31].

Bazerman and Carroll [32] developed a cognitive framework of negotiation that allows these different theoretical views and disciplinary backgrounds to interact with each other. The cognitive model views negotiation as a decision-making process in which each party considers the information in the situation, analyzes the other party’s behavior, assesses possible consequences, and acts accordingly [33,34].

This cognitive framework has been used extensively in studying cross-cultural negotiation, because it succeeded in integrating the normative and descriptive models of negotiation. The extant research on cross-cultural negotiation has revealed much about how negotiators’ cognitive processes and behaviors differ depending on their cultural backgrounds. In the next section, we look at the factors that researchers view as drivers of cultural differences in negotiation behaviors such as frames or cognitive representations of conflicts and various biases including self-serving biases, fixed pie biases, and internal attributions [6,7,8,35,36,37].

2.1. Cross-Cultural Negotiation: Focus on Cognition and Behavior

While decades of research on negotiation spawned numerous theories and models of negotiation, researchers have noticed that our understanding of conflict may be culture-bound, meaning that the findings are limited to Euro-American thoughts and traditions and culture-blind, meaning that it had neglected the role of culture in negotiation [38,39]. Thus, researchers introduced topics from cross-cultural psychology to predict how people from different cultures may behave in negotiations and to explain the causes of these cultural variations.

An important concept in discussing cross-cultural negotiation has been the negotiators’ frames or cognitive representations of conflicts [5,40]. Cross-cultural studies on cognitive representations in negotiation primarily draw from Markus and Kitayama’s theory of self-construal [41]. The self-construal theory states that people from Western cultures possess an individualistic construal of the self, whereas people from Eastern cultures possess an interdependent construal of the self; the different types of self-construal affect numerous aspects of people’s psyche including cognition, emotion, and motivation [41,42].

Gelfand and colleagues [5] attempted to apply this concept to negotiation by using the idea of conflict frames. Conflict frames are cognitive structures or interpretations of conflict that guide negotiators’ behavior [34]. Gelfand and colleagues [5] argued that although the existence of conflict frames was universal, the development of a particular conflict frame was affected by culture. They found that of the three dimensions of conflict frame suggested by Pinkley [34], only the compromise vs. win dimension was universal, a finding that suggests that there is some universality in people’s understanding of conflict. However, instead of the other two dimensions included in Pinkley’s theory, Japanese showed new, distinct dimensions of conflict frames such as giri violations (i.e., duty to repay obligations vs. duty to maintain one’s reputation) and differentiation-of-self-from-others [5,34]. Moreover, along the compromise vs. win dimension, Americans and Japanese showed different perceptions in that Americans showed win-oriented tendencies and Japanese showed compromise-oriented tendencies [5].

Researchers also identified some cognitive biases that are stronger in Western culture and weaker or non-existent in other cultures. It has been found that, compared to non-Western samples, Americans made more internal attributions in judging their opponents’ negotiation behavior [36,37]. Americans and Japanese differed even in their idea of fairness; Americans’ assessment of fairness was based on their economic alternatives, whereas that of Japanese’ was based on their obligations to others [43]. In the same sense, Chinese negotiators were more susceptible to the influence of others than their American counterparts [44].

Instead of cognition, some researchers focused on the specific behaviors displayed by negotiators in cross-cultural negotiations [45,46,47]. It is important to consider culture in studying negotiation behaviors, because culture determines specific values that dominate the negotiators’ behaviors [45]. Tinsley and Pillutla [46] found that American negotiators were more likely to adopt self-interest and joint problem-solving norms whereas Hong Kong Chinese tended to adopt an equality norm and behave accordingly. Americans and Chinese differed in using ethically questionable tactics in negotiations depending on the nationality of the counterpart [47].

Many theories on communication methods in cross-cultural negotiation also provided an explanation for the differences in people’s negotiation behavior by using the theory of high-context and low-context cultures [48]. People in high-context cultures such as Chinese, utilized more nonverbal or situational information in communicating with others, whereas people in low-context cultures such as American were more direct and verbal in their methods of communication [49]. As people in low-context cultures sometimes find it difficult to understand the nonverbal or situational information, when people from high-context and low-context cultures are negotiating, it is best to rely on a direct method of communication, the negotiators’ common denominator [50,51].

2.2. Limitations of Research on Cross-Cultural Negotiation

Although existing research on cross-cultural negotiation has revealed much about how negotiators’ cognitive processes and behaviors differ depending on their cultural background, it has been criticized that other important psychological variables, namely motivation and emotion, have not been researched as thoroughly [52,53,54,55]. As can be seen in

Table 1. Summary of key findings on the emotional aspect of cross-cultural negotiation.

Authors	Cross-Cultural Context	Emotions	Outcomes
Adam and Shirako (2013) [56]	East Asian negotiators—European American and Hispanic negotiators	Anger expression (East Asian stereotype: emotionally inexpressive)	Angry East Asian elicits greater cooperation.
Adam, Shirako, and Maddux (2010) [57]	Asian and Asian American negotiators—European American negotiators	Anger expression (East Asian emotion display norms: Anger expression is inappropriate.)	Anger expression elicits larger concessions from Westerners and smaller concessions from Easterners.
Lee, Yang, and Graham (2006) [58]	Chinese negotiators—American negotiators	Felt tension during negotiations	For Chinese, greater tension increases the likelihood of an agreement, whereas for Americans, the likelihood of an agreement marginally decreases.
Luomala, Kumar, Singh, and Jaakkola (2015) [59]	Indian negotiators—Finnish negotiators	Dejection- and agitation-related emotions	Finnish experience more dejection than agitation in an unsuccessful negotiation, followed by reengagement with the opponent to achieve positive outcome. In contrast, Indians report positive or neutral emotions even in an unsuccessful negotiation.
Kopelman and Rosette (2008) [60]	East Asian and Hong Kong Asian negotiators—Israeli negotiators	Positive or negative emotion expression East Asian emotion display norms: Positive emotion communicates humility and respect.)	Easterners accept an offer from an opponent who displayed positive emotion.

which summarizes key findings from the literature on emotional aspect of cross-cultural negotiation, the role emotion plays in the dynamics of cross-cultural negotiations has received little research attention.

This tendency is understandable given that during the cognitive revolution, emotion had been considered an undesirable, uncontrollable force that should be suppressed [45]. Due to the vast neglect of affective emotional process, the cognitive processes have been widely misused and overused on learning and information processing [61]. However, increased attention to motivation and emotion in organizational behavior research has revealed that these variables are just as critical in understanding people’s behaviors as other variables [62,63]. Cromwell and Panksepp [61] suggest that affective emotional systems and motivational processes are essential for making sense of our environments. By guiding us to understand our environment, emotional systems help guide our decision making and reinforce our learning. Therefore, to achieve a more integrated understanding of the negotiation process and outcomes, more attention should be brought to the role of affective and motivational processes.

People’s motivation or motivational patterns serve an important purpose in that these are the reasons why people choose to engage in certain behaviors or strategies over others [21,22]. Most researchers studying cross-cultural negotiation have focused on the specific values or communication methods that affect negotiation performance [46,51]; while these variables provide an extensive explanation for the differences in people’s negotiation behaviors, why people in certain cultures develop values or communication methods that are different from those of others warrants further exploration.

Similarly, emotion also has functional roles and strategic uses in negotiations [64,65]. Research on emotion in negotiation has concentrated on the empirical findings that are created by manipulating negotiators’ emotions [52]. An alternative approach that looks at emotion as social information has gained attention, which captures the inter-personal nature of the emotion [15,16].

The following section will discuss the two variables that have gained less research attention in the past: motivation and emotion in negotiation. In particular, we discuss the relationship between the cultural differences in regulatory focus and the cultural biases in emotion recognition.

3. Regulatory Focus and Emotion Recognition

Regulatory focus is a concept derived from a long tradition of theories on people’s basic motivational drive to approach pleasure and avoid pain [66,67,68]. The regulatory focus theory reveals how and why people differ in their ways of approaching pleasure and avoiding pain [21,22]. Regulatory focus can be either chronic or situational [66]. Chronic regulatory focus is an individual differences measure that shows people’s consistent pattern of motivation, whereas situational regulatory focus can be manipulated by emphasizing gains or losses in the given situation.

For both chronic and situational regulatory focus, there are two types of regulatory focus: promotion-focus and prevention-focus [66,69]. Although the properties of chronic promotion- and prevention-focus and situational promotion- and prevention-focus are similar, only chronic regulatory focus develops from the different types of self-discrepancies that people possess [66,70]. Those who usually experience a discrepancy between their actual-selves and their ideal-selves develop chronic promotion-focus. Those who usually experience a discrepancy between their actual-selves and their ought-selves develop chronic prevention-focus. When there is an agreement between the chronic regulatory focus of the individual and the situational regulatory focus of the given context, there is a regulatory fit. When there is a disagreement, there is a regulatory fit violation.

It is important to note, that while individuals with promotion- and prevention-focus both approach pleasure and avoid pain, promotion-focused individuals pay attention to the achievements that they want to attain; they approach when they see possible gains and avoid when they do not expect any gains [66]. On the other hand, prevention-focused individuals pay attention to the negative consequences and are vigilant to assure safety; they approach when they think that the chance of losing is low and they avoid when they sense the danger of losing [66].

This difference between the types of chronic regulatory focus leads people to act in distinctive ways [21,71,72,73]. Promotion-focused individuals show approach strategies (a strategic inclination to show approach behavior, especially in ambiguous situations), generate more hypotheses, and are more open to change. On the contrary, prevention-focused individuals show avoidance strategies (a strategic inclination to show avoidance behavior, especially in ambiguous situations), generate fewer hypotheses, and are more focused on stability.

Aside from strategic inclinations, the different types of regulatory focus are also associated with emotional experiences [21,69,70,73]. Promotion-focused individuals, with actual- and ideal-self discrepancy, have a tendency to experience dejection-related emotions that are negative in valence and low in arousal (e.g., sadness, disappointment, and dissatisfaction) when they fail to attain gains. Prevention-focused individuals, with actual- and ought-self discrepancy, have a tendency to experience agitation-related emotions that are negative in valence and high in arousal (e.g., edginess, uneasiness, and tenseness) when they fail to avoid losses. When promotion-focused people succeed in aligning their actual-selves with their ideal-selves or attain desirable gains, they tend to feel excited and cheerful. When prevention-focused people succeed in aligning their actual-selves with their ought-selves or avoid the undesirable losses, they tend to feel calm and quiescent. Thus, promotion-focused people move along the cheerfulness-dejection dimension on the circumplex model of affect and prevention-focused people, along the quiescence-agitation dimension [74].

Conclusion 1.

Promotion-focus is associated with cheerfulness- or dejection-related emotion and prevention-focus is associated with quiescence- or agitation-related emotion.

3.1. Cultural Differences in Regulatory Focus

Like many other individual difference measures, chronic regulatory focus shows a cultural difference [75,76,77,78,79]. Studies have confirmed that East Asians endorsed prevention-focus more strongly than Westerners and Westerners endorsed promotion-focus more strongly than East Asians [76,78]. As previously stated, different regulatory foci arise from different types of self-discrepancy. In Western cultures, the concept of ideal-self is emphasized and people tend to develop a discrepancy between their ideal-selves and their actual selves; this discrepancy leads to promotion-focus. In East Asian cultures, the concept of ought-self is emphasized and people likely develop a discrepancy between their ought-selves and their ideal-selves; this discrepancy leads to prevention-focus. Uskul and colleagues [76] used Lockwood’s regulatory focus questionnaire [80] in conducting the study. Hamamura and colleagues [78] asked the participants to list five types of events (promotion-focus-success, promotion-focus-failure, prevention-focus-success, prevention-focus-failure, and neutral) and to recall the items after engaging in a cognitive load task (method modeled after Higgins and Tykocinski [81]). Although the methods used were different, both studies yielded consistent main effects for culture in chronic regulatory focus.

Conclusion 2.

Westerners are more promotion-focused and East Asians are more prevention-focused.

3.2. Regulatory Fit and Cognitive Biases

Another concept that stems from chronic regulatory focus is regulatory fit: regulatory fit is the fit between the chronic regulatory focus of the individual and the situational regulatory focus required by the given task [20]. If there is a fit between regulatory focus of the person and that of the situation, the value experience of the person—how good or bad the situation feels—increases. It is important to note that this change in value experience occurs independently of the pleasure and the pain that is inherent in the experience [20]. In relation to regulatory fit, some cognitive biases that people commit have been suggested [82]; in an experiment, promotion- and prevention-focused participants were asked to detect and report irregular signals. Those who were promotion-focused showed a risky bias; they were more likely to mistakenly report signals when there were no signals. In contrast, those who were prevention-focused showed a conservative bias; they were more likely to mistakenly miss signals. From these findings, Higgins [82] concluded that people are unconsciously inclined to behave in ways that lead to higher regulatory fit.

We extend this argument by suggesting an emotional route of achieving regulatory fit. As previously mentioned, promotion-focus is connected to cheerfulness- or dejection-related emotion on the circumplex model of affect and prevention-focus, to quiescence- or agitation-related emotion [22,69,70,73,74]. When a promotion-focused individual, for example, notices another person expressing quiescence in a positive situation, this signals a regulatory fit violation. If the signal is clear and accurate, individuals will likely accept the signal even though there is a regulatory fit violation. However, when the signal is ambiguous (e.g., multiple emotional cues each showing different emotions), the individual’s motivation to achieve regulatory fit may unconsciously lead the individual to form a bias in emotion recognition.

Conclusion 3.

People are inclined to behave in ways that lead to higher regulatory fit. They may achieve higher regulatory fit by developing cognitive or emotion recognition biases.

3.3. Regulatory Fit and Emotion Recognition Biases

Based on previous research in the literature, we can conclude that different cultures are associated with different regulatory foci, and that individuals tend to behave in ways that increase regulatory fit. From these conclusions, we build our argument that negotiating partners with different cultural backgrounds, who possess different regulatory foci, show cultural biases in recognizing the opponent’s emotion, but only when the situation is emotionally ambiguous.

3.3.1. Cultural Difference in Emotion Recognition

Most studies on emotion recognition have focused on the source of the emotional cue. Researchers looked at how people use different emotional cues to understand others’ emotions. For example, drawing on the emotion overgeneralization hypothesis, Todorov [83] found that, in the absence of diagnostic emotional cues, people make judgments of trustworthiness or untrustworthiness based on facial appearances that resemble emotional expressions of happiness or anger. This study shows that people actively seek emotional information from others’ facial features to make social judgments such as trustworthiness or attractiveness especially when explicit emotional cues are not available. However, according to Colonnello and colleagues [84], facial appearance bias interferes with both emotion recognition accuracy and speed. The result of an experimental study of medical students showed that subjects were less accurate and slower in their recognition of emotions for untrustworthy looking faces than for trustworthy ones. Yet, this bias was weakened when the emotional care frame that elicits a caring response to others was activated [85]. Additionally, accurate recognition of fear facial expression has been linked to prosocial tendencies through the activation of concern-for-others mechanisms [86].

Of the findings on this topic, the two notable theories are the facial dominance theory and the limited situational dominance theory. The facial dominance theory suggests that when people are presented with mismatched facial expressions and situational information, they focus more on the facial expression in attributing other people’s emotions [87]. However, it has been found that facial dominance seems to exist only when the facial expression and the story were opposite in valence; when there was a mismatch between the facial expression and the story, but the emotions in both the face and the story were negative in valence, people focused more on the story, a phenomenon known as limited situational dominance [88].

Later, researchers began to study cultural differences in emotion recognition. This topic has not been studied in the 1970s, because many assumed that the experience and the recognition of emotion were universal [87,89,90]. Indeed, research has shown cross-cultural similarities in recognizing specific emotions in facial expressions [91]. However, an increasing number of studies have suggested that there are some important cultural variations in people’s understanding of emotion, especially in emotionally ambiguous situations [91,92,93,94,95,96,97,98]. For example, while both Westerners and Easterners attend to contextual information, they tend to apply different strategies in using the information [99]. The study by Stanley and colleagues [100] reports that Americans, by using contrasting strategy, are more accurate than Chinese at recognizing a target’s emotion embedded in other facial expressions. Additionally, East Asians have been found to recognize emotions of close others more accurately than European Americans did, which indicates a strong interdependent self-construal of East Asians [101].

Of the studies on cultural differences in emotion recognition, a study by Masuda and colleagues [95] has received significant attention. When the emotion shown in the main character’s facial expression and the emotion shown in the context were mismatched, Japanese relied more on the emotion in the context compared to their American counterparts. The differences between Japanese and Americans were small, but the findings were still significant and were replicated in their second study, which included eye-tracking data to detect the areas in which people focused on the most. The cultural difference in Masuda’s study likely resulted from the cultural difference in the patterns of attention: Westerners have a more analytic pattern of attention, whereas East Asians have a more holistic pattern of attention [102]. Thus Masuda’s findings show that, because East Asians have a holistic pattern of attention, they are more balanced in the attention they give to the story and the face; westerners primarily focus on the face. However, a study conducted by Han and colleagues [103] found that although the effect of culture seen in Masuda’s study could be replicated, there was another pattern of cultural difference that was not only more consistent across story–face pair, but also larger in effect size.

3.3.2. An Alternative Explanation for the Cultural Difference in Emotion Recognition

A series of studies by Han and colleagues [103] created emotionally ambiguous situations by using facial expressions and short stories and revealed a cultural difference in how people recognize others’ emotions. Emotionally ambiguous situations were operationalized by creating a mismatch between the emotion expressed by the story (the situational context of the emotion) and that expressed by the facial expression; American and Korean participants were asked to respond to a questionnaire that contained 16 mismatched story–face pairs. More specifically, each page of the questionnaire had a short story that conveyed one emotion and a picture of the protagonist of the story posing one specific facial expression that is different from the emotion in the story. Participants were told that the protagonist made the facial expression as he or she was experiencing the event in the story. Then the participants were asked to indicate what emotion the protagonist felt and to what degree.

The results were congruent with Masuda’s findings [95] in that Americans focused more on the facial expression in the story–face pair than Koreans, and Koreans focused more on the story in the story–face pair than Americans, F(1, 122) = 4.15, p = 0.04, η² = 0.03. However, this main effect was qualified by a large interaction effect between the type of story–face pair (the emotion category used in the story–face pair) and culture. When the emotions in the mismatched story–face pairs were all negative in valence, with one high-arousal negative and one low-arousal negative emotion, Americans judged the story–face pairs to be more sad than Koreans, whereas Koreans judged the same story–face pair to be more angry, F(1, 122) = 48.84, p < 0.001, partial η² = 0.29. Although it is yet to be tested, Han and colleagues [103] also predicted that a similar pattern would exist in ambiguous positive situations and reported satisfactory pilot results. When participants were presented with mismatched positive emotions, Americans judged the other person’s emotion as excitement (high-arousal positive emotion), whereas Koreans judged the same person’s emotion as serenity (low-arousal positive emotion).

Conclusion 4a.

In recognizing others’ emotions that are ambiguous, but clearly positive, Americans are more likely to judge the other person’s emotion as excitement, whereas Koreans are more likely to judge the same person’s emotion as serenity.

Conclusion 4b.

In recognizing others’ emotions that are ambiguous, but clearly negative, Americans are more likely to judge the other person’s emotion as sadness, whereas Koreans are more likely to judge the same person’s emotion as anger.

To explain such consistent and strong cultural biases in emotion recognition, we approach this issue from the perspective of regulatory focus theory. According to Higgins [82], people are inclined to behave in ways that improve regulatory fit. Higgins limited his discussion to cognitive biases, but we believe that the same could be stated for emotion recognition. As stated in the introduction of this paper, research on emotion suggest that people project their own emotion onto others in recognizing others’ emotion and that such interpersonal biases are often driven by motivational goals [23,24,25]. When the emotion of the other person is clear, there would not be much individual difference in emotion recognition. However, when the situation is emotionally ambiguous (two or more emotion cues [e.g., the face and the story] each conveying different emotions) the process of emotion recognition involves some subjectivity and judgment. We predict that when in such emotionally ambiguous situations, people will form emotion recognition biases to increase regulatory fit. For Westerners, who are mostly promotion-focused, there should be a recognition bias toward high-arousal positive and low-arousal negative emotions, because these emotions increase regulatory fit. For East Asians, who are mostly prevention-focused, there should be a recognition bias toward low-arousal positive and high-arousal negative emotions, because these emotions increase regulatory fit. By combining conclusions 1, 2, 3, and 4, we arrive at the following propositions:

Proposition 1a.

Westerners, who are promotion-focused, will develop a recognition-bias toward high-arousal positive and low-arousal negative emotions, because these emotions increase regulatory fit.

Proposition 1b.

East Asians, who are prevention-focused, will develop a recognition-bias toward low-arousal positive and high-arousal negative emotions, because these emotions increase regulatory fit.

4. Emotion Recognition and Behavior in Cross-Cultural Negotiation

Research on the role of emotion in negotiation can largely be divided into two: research that focuses on the emotional experience of the negotiator and research that looks at emotion as social information. We introduce both lines of research with a focus on the latter in building our propositions because we believe that it better captures the inherently social nature of emotions during negotiation [104].

4.1. Focus on Emotional Experience of Negotiators (Intra-Personal Effect of Emotion)

A number of studies have shown that the mood state or the emotion individuals experience during negotiations can affect their negotiating behaviors [105]. A classic study shows that when people are put in a positive mood, they are more likely to focus on the cooperative efforts of their negotiating partner [106]. Thus, the negotiators are more likely to engage in cooperative information exchange, which leads to more creative and integrative solutions [106,107,108,109]. On the other hand, it has been found that negative mood decreased initial offers and joint gains and promoted the use of more competitive strategies [107,109,110,111,112,113]. Negative mood also decreased the likelihood of the negotiators working together in the future [109].

4.2. Focus on Emotion as Social Information (Inter-Personal Effect of Emotion)

Emotion is, by its nature, social [114,115]. Our emotions are not only evoked by social interaction, but they also serve as a method of communication and shape the behavior of the interaction partner [116,117,118]. In interpersonal relationships, emotions provide information about the person’s current feelings, social intentions, and engagement in the relationship [104,119,120].

The EASI (Emotion As Social Information) model, developed by van Kleef and colleagues [15,16,17,121], provides a comprehensive framework for a motivated information processing account of the interpersonal effects of anger and happiness in negotiation. Although the model does not consider cultural differences in emotion recognition, it provides us with a basis for our argument that people use emotion as social information in negotiation and respond to others’ emotions differently according to the epistemic motivation of information processing. Epistemic motivation can be different based on individuals’ differences such as their chronic need for cognitive closure. For example, van Kleef and colleagues [104] identified that people having a low need for cognitive closure tend to concede more to an angry partner than a happy one because people having a low need for cognitive closure are more affected by partners’ emotion due to high level of motivation to use partners’ emotions as information.

It also varies according to situational factors. A number of studies have confirmed and extended the EASI model [14,16,104,122]. As for the emotion of anger, a high-arousal negative emotion, a few studies have shown that participants’ reactions to angry opponents were moderated by power. When the opponent was high in power, the participants conceded more easily and offered more, but when the opponent was low in power, the participants actually reciprocated the anger, a response that led them to offer less [14,122]. Similarly, negotiators are more affected by partners’ anger under low time pressure than high, because time pressure reduces their motivation of information processing [104].

Regarding the emotion of disappointment, a low-arousal negative emotion, it has been found that those faced with disappointed opponents made higher offers, regardless of the power position, because the participants felt guilty toward the disappointed opponent [14]. An experimental study showed the effects of sadness, another low-arousal negative emotion, in negotiations [123]. Displays of sadness were effective in securing collaboration only when the target experienced empathy and compassion.

Conclusion 5a.

When the opponent was high in power and expressed anger, the participants conceded more easily and offered more resources; when the opponent was low in power, the participant reciprocated the anger and offered less resources.

Conclusion 5b.

When the opponent expressed disappointment or sadness, participants felt guilty and offered more resources regardless of the power position of the opponent.

To our knowledge, no study has looked at the effect of the opponents’ emotions when the opponent is feeling excited (high-arousal positive) vs. serene (low-arousal positive). However, there are studies on the interpersonal effect of happiness in negotiation [105,124]. When the opponent expressed happiness, participants assumed that the opponent is satisfied with the distribution of resources and that he or she does not aspire to attain more; this assumption led them to offer less resources to the opponent. With scant research addressing the effects of high- or low-arousal positive emotions in negotiations, it is difficult to make a claim regarding the arousal level of positive emotions.

Conclusion 6.

When the opponent is feeling excited or serene, participants will assume that the opponent is satisfied with the distribution of resources and will offer less resources.

Proposition 2.

When a person perceives that a high-power opponent is feeling angry, the person is more likely to concede and offer more in negotiation; when a person perceives that a low-power opponent is feeling angry, the person is more likely to reciprocate the anger and offer less in negotiation.

Proposition 3.

When a person perceives that an opponent is feeling sad or disappointed, the person is more likely to offer more in negotiation, regardless of the power position of the opponent.

Proposition 4.

When a person perceives that an opponent is feeling excited or serene, the person assumes that the opponent is satisfied with the allocation of resources and is more likely to offer less in negotiations, regardless of the power position of the opponent.

The four propositions of this study are summarized in Figure 1.

5. Motivation–Emotion Model of Cross-Cultural Negotiation

From the propositions that we have drawn so far, we have built the motivation–emotion model of cross-cultural negotiation. We believe that a model that focuses on the interplay between motivation and emotion during the negotiation process can fill in the gaps of current research on cross-cultural negotiation and enhance our understanding of the negotiation process. Here, we bring together the propositions that were presented throughout this paper. From propositions 1, 2, 3, and 4 we can state that Westerners, who tend to be more promotion-focused, will show an emotion recognition bias toward excitement in ambiguous positive situations and sadness in ambiguous negative situations. Hence, in ambiguous positive situations, Westerners will believe that the opponent is feeling excited and will offer more, regardless of the power position of the opponent. In ambiguous negative situations, Westerners will believe that the opponent is feeling sad and disappointed and will offer more regardless of the power position of the opponent. In contrast, East Asians, who are more prevention-focused, will show an emotion recognition bias toward serenity in ambiguous positive situations and anger in ambiguous negative situations. Therefore, in ambiguous positive situations, East Asians will believe that the opponent is feeling serene and will offer more, regardless of the power position of the opponent. In ambiguous negative situations, East Asians will believe that the opponent is feeling angry and will offer more if the opponent is high in power and offer less if the opponent is low in power.

Several variables could be suggested as possible moderators of the proposed relationships. First, as seen in the results of van Kleef’s study [125], power is a moderator of the relationship between the perceived emotion of the opponent and the negotiation behavior of the participant. Even when the opponent’s emotion was the same, the participant responded differently depending on the power position of the opponent. However, it is important to note that the relationship between power and emotion can go both ways [126]. A study by Tiedens and colleagues [127] revealed that emotions themselves are indicative of people’s status; participants viewed individuals who expressed anger as being higher in status, whereas they viewed the same individual who expressed sadness as being lower in status. Additionally, participants saw the angry candidate as being higher in position in the company and receiving higher salaries than the sad candidate. Although power manipulated in experiments serves as a moderator for the emotional exchange between the negotiators, in the actual workplace, it is more likely that there is a two-way relationship between power and emotion.

Second, Elfenbein and colleagues found that emotion recognition accuracy (ERA), which has been theorized to be one of the core components of emotional intelligence, plays a role in determining people’s negotiation performance [128,129]. They used mixed-motive interactions, in which the negotiators had to both cooperate and compete simultaneously (similar to integrative negotiation). The results showed that higher scores on emotion recognition accuracy were associated with objectively better performance on both the cooperation and the competition dimension [128,130]. Relatedly, it has been reported that burnout leads people to misread others’ emotions by misclassifying fear or anger into happiness [131]. People experiencing burnout show a limited capability to read others’ negative emotions, in particular. Thus, the ability to recognize others’ emotions accurately, which may be affected by one’s experience of burnout, has the potential to moderate the link between the perceived emotion of the opponent and the negotiation behavior and outcome.

Third, a line of research on cultural intelligence shows its positive impact on cross-cultural negotiation performance [132,133]. Defined as one’s cultural consciousness and knowledge, motivation to learn and adapt to new cultures, and ability to act appropriately in culturally diverse settings [134], people with cultural intelligence are better at perceiving and acting upon the nuances in cross-cultural contexts [135]. They also have been reported to show more interest-based negotiation behaviors including active exploration of opponent’s interests and search for creative resolution [132]. Cultural intelligence may not only motivate cautious interpretation of opponents’ emotional displays but also lead to desirable negotiated outcomes based on mutual understanding.

Finally, Colonnello and colleagues [85] suggest the importance of care-for-others schema and related confidence and efficacy for accurate emotion recognition. Biases such as the first impressions based on people’s facial appearance have been reported to influence the interpretation of basic emotions. For instance, untrustworthy-looking faces induce emotion recognition inaccuracy and decrease emotion recognition speed, whereas trustworthy-looking faces increase emotion recognition accuracy as well as speed across emotions. Notably, activating one’s self-image as a confident and professional caregiver enhanced emotion recognition accuracy regardless of the trustworthiness of facial appearance. This finding suggests a potential intervention mechanism for enhancing the accuracy of emotion recognition of negotiating partners by framing the situation as a win-win or collaborative endeavor instead of competition. The aforementioned research sheds light on the critical factors that have the potential to impact the emotion recognition processes and outcomes in negotiation settings.

Although this research focuses on the cross-cultural effect on emotion perceiver in negotiations, emotion expresser also can be affected by cultural background. According to Adam and Shirako [56], Asian negotiators tend to display anger more to elicit cooperation from their counter-partners than European American negotiators do. Besides, Adam and Brett [136] investigated the effect of anger on negotiation outcomes under different contexts. Under competitive context balanced with cooperation, displaying anger leads to larger concessions than no anger. However, under either dominantly competitive context or dominantly cooperative context, expressing anger does not evoke larger concessions than no anger. This study suggests that the interpretation of the context in negotiations can affect the effect of anger expression on negotiation outcomes. This implication brings up the possibility that cross-cultural background can affect emotion expressers through the perception of the context in negotiations. To understand the effects of cross-cultural emotions on negotiation comprehensively, it is necessary to investigate how cultural background interacts with not only emotion perceivers but also emotion expressers.

6. Discussion

Negotiation is an important topic, because the failure of negotiation results in strikes, decreased harmony and cooperation, and threats to the survival of the organization [137]. The consequences of negotiation failure are even more serious in cross-border negotiations and include catastrophic results such as inefficient economic trade and war [32]. For this reason, many researchers have studied negotiations from numerous disciplines. However, much of previous research on negotiation is limited to cognitive and behavioral elements of negotiation and other variables such as emotion and motivation have not been studied as much. Thus, this paper is important in that it attempts to merge two variables that have not been studied together in cross-cultural negotiation.

6.1. Theoretical Implications

This study draws on the potential relationship between regulatory focus and emotion recognition bias to explain cultural differences in negotiation behaviors. An increasing number of studies have looked at the role of these two topics on negotiation, but, to our knowledge, none attempted to connect emotional recognition bias with regulatory focus. By doing so, we proposed a motivational mechanism that drives people’s emotional recognition bias, which in turn, affects the negotiators’ behaviors.

So far, regulatory focus and regulatory fit have been studied only in relation to cognitive biases. This paper extends on the statement that individuals are prone to behave in ways that increase regulatory fit and argues that such inclination can lead to emotion recognition biases. As there is a cultural difference in chronic regulatory focus, we suggested that regulatory focus is an underlying mechanism of cultural differences in emotion recognition bias.

To be more specific, our assumption and the conclusion of this paper rest on the projection mechanism. In the process of recognizing the negotiation partner’s emotion, people tend to project their own emotional tendencies onto the partner. In doing so, they achieve a sense of regulatory fit [22]. The assumption that people will project their emotional tendencies onto others stems from the finding in the literature that people often project their own emotions onto others in the emotion recognition process. A classic study suggested that when the participants felt angry, they were more likely to project their own emotions onto others and assume that the other people are also angry and are in hostile situations [23]. In ambiguous emotional situations, people likely resort to the projection mechanism, and will be inclined to recognize emotions in ways that fit their chronic regulatory focus better than others.

This study is also notable in that it focuses on the intra-personal effect of emotion in negotiation. Most studies in the past have looked mainly at the inter-personal effect of emotion in negotiation. Later, an increasing number of studies including this conceptual paper has turned to the intra-personal effect of emotion in negotiation. This trend is very important, because it complements the inter-personal perspective and captures the full spectrum of social and dynamic nature of the emotional exchanges in negotiation. Especially in cross-cultural negotiations, it is important to focus on the interpretations of others’ emotion, because oftentimes people lack information about other cultures and make mistakes. By approaching cross-cultural negotiation from an intra-personal perspective of emotion, this study sheds light on ways to foster mutual understanding in cross-cultural negotiation settings, which likely results in sustainable conflict resolutions.

6.2. Practical Implications

A practical implication of the motivation–emotion model of negotiation is that one of the moderators, emotion recognition accuracy, can be used to improve individuals’ performance in cross-cultural negotiation. It has been found that individuals can be trained to recognize others’ emotions more accurately and that this improved accuracy leads to higher emotional competence on the part of the individual [138]. The same can be said for emotion recognition accuracy in negotiation. Training people to recognize others’ emotions can reduce the emotion recognition biases of the negotiators, and improve negotiation performance.

In addition, by understanding that people from different cultural backgrounds have different regulatory foci, negotiators in cross-cultural negotiations can understand each other better. This conceptual paper looked at not only the cultural biases in emotion recognition, but also the motivational mechanisms that create these biases. Through cross-cultural training programs, people can nurture cultural intelligence [132] and enhance their understanding of the emotional expressions of the negotiating partner. Such mutual understanding will likely bring positive effects in cross-cultural negotiation.

6.3. Limitations and Future Research Directions

Our research contributions need to be qualified in light of the following limitations, which suggest directions for future research. First, this paper has focused on the emotional aspect of cross-cultural negotiation. Although certain cognitive concepts are discussed, this paper excluded the cognitive aspect in its discussion of the negotiation process. However, the idea of using others’ emotions as social information innately has some cognitive elements in that perceiving emotions from various emotional cues and digesting that information is a cognitive process. In future research, it would be interesting to study if there is a common motivational drive that can explain both emotional and cognitive biases in cross-cultural negotiation.

Second, a more practical limitation is that in real-life situations, some of the variables in this model may interact with each other. For instance, research suggests that there might be a two-way relationship between power and emotion [127]. The same might be true for power and motivation. For instance, since chronic regulatory focus is an individual differences measure, those that are successful and in high-power positions may belong to a group that shares certain characteristics; they might be more balanced between the prevention- and promotion-focused perspectives, a characteristic that leads them to be broader and more insightful in their thinking, which in turn can give them success and power. At this point, no conclusive propositions can be made about how motivation and emotion will affect the results of cross-cultural negotiations. We can make propositions about how people from different cultures, who possess different chronic regulatory foci and different emotion recognition biases, will behave in negotiations, but it is difficult to claim how the results would turn out, because the variables might interact with each other. For that reason, this model should be tested not only in the lab, but also in the field and the relationships between the variables in this model should be carefully analyzed.

Third, a stream of research identifies emotional display norms as an important element of cross-cultural negotiation [57,60,139,140]. Display rules tend to differ across different cultures such that certain emotions are deemed more appropriate than others in public situations involving interactions with others. Results by Matsumoto [139] show that Americans consider displays of happiness more appropriate than Japanese do, and that displays of disgust and sadness in in-groups are rated appropriate for Americans while displays of anger are rated more appropriate in out-groups for Japanese. In collectivistic cultures in general, expressing anger or sadness is considered less acceptable than in individualistic cultures [140,141]. Prior studies indicate that display norms of Easterners include inhibition of negative emotions whereas Westerners tend to be more tolerant of displays of negative emotions.

Extending to negotiation settings, East Asians have been found to show a propensity to accept an offer from an opponent who displays positive emotions [60]. In contrast, they concede less to an angry opponent than European Americans do, which is explained by East Asians’ assessments of anger displays as inappropriate [57]. Although communication of respect, humility, and deference through displays of positive emotions is an effective negotiation strategy across most cultures, it may be especially so with East Asians as it often leads to desirable negotiated outcomes. When it comes to ambiguous emotional displays, however, a motivated emotion recognition process may take place to achieve regulatory fit as suggested by our proposed model. The subtle interplay between emotional display norms and cultural biases in emotion recognition warrants further exploration.

Fourth, another interesting aspect of cultural differences in the emotion recognition process lies in the attention to either the eyes or mouths. Easterners have been reported to focus more on eye signals whereas Westerners weighed features around the mouth more heavily [142,143]. While direct eye contact has been associated with assertiveness or intimidation, in general, resulting in unsuccessful attempts at persuasion [144], future research may explore whether the negative negotiated outcomes could be even more pronounced with Easterners who tend to pay more attention to eye cues.

Fifth, while this study focuses on a specific context in which the negotiating partner’s emotion is ambiguous (i.e., multiple emotion cues indicating different emotions), a study by Fang and colleagues [145] shows the possibility of viewers recognizing multiple emotions from a given facial expression. This propensity was more pronounced among Chinese observers who perceived disgust and fear at the facial expression of anger than Dutch observers. Due to the Easterners’ tendencies to take an interdependent, holistic perspective in understanding self and the environment, it is likely that they will perceive more unintended emotions than Westerners, which may increase the degree of emotional ambiguity for Easterners in a given situation. A further investigation of how cultural differences may shape people’s assessment of emotional ambiguity in negotiation settings is recommended.

Finally, although we limit our discussion to how the cultural differences in regulatory focus and emotion recognition affect negotiation behaviors, we believe that the cultural differences in regulatory focus and emotion recognition can also be connected to other interpersonal dynamics in organizations. Some potential topics for future research might be the effect of these cultural differences on leader–follower relationships or team performance. The cultural differences proposed in this research is recommended to be applied to other topics in management.

7. Conclusions

In this study, we discussed cultural differences in motivation and emotion and proposed the motivation–emotion model of cross-cultural negotiation. The model intended to capture how cultural differences in regulatory focus and emotion recognition tendencies influence negotiation behaviors. We also suggested some potential moderators of the negotiation process such as power and emotion recognition accuracy. This holistic perspective helps us look beyond the surface and understand the motivational mechanisms that drive people’s emotion recognition biases in cross-cultural negotiation, which promotes sustainable practices in cross-cultural negotiation.