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. While evidence from Western societies suggests that anger motivates confrontational responses and disgust favors indirect, relational strategies, we further tested the cross-cultural generality of this divergence in an East Asian, high-context environment. Two large-scale studies in Japan reveal robust functional stability: Study 1 (N = 1,231) revealed that anger relates to motives to aggress both directly and indirectly, whereas disgust relates only to motives to aggress indirectly. Study 2 (N = 930) extended these findings by showing that people infer greater direct aggression from anger expressions and greater indirect aggression from disgust expressions. 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.

Further, we extend our exploration to cross-cultural interactions. As the links between specific emotions and aggression categories show generality, we examined how differences in display prototypes and cultural norms influence the interpretation of ethnical/cultrual-outgroup signals. A Dutch–Japanese vocalization-perception study (N = 2,000) revealed a significant in-group advantage: participants were more accurate at identifying both the cultural origin and the specific emotional category  of in-group expressors. Crucially, results identified an asymmetrical cultural mismatch : while Dutch listeners significantly underestimated the intensity of Japanese vocalizations—particularly anger —Japanese listeners perceived their own "restrained" expressions as highly potent. This challenges the assumption that Western vocalizations serve as a universal "gold standard" for emotional intensity. Furthermore, we found that listeners’ subjective emotion perception is a stronger predictor of aggression inference than the stimulus label itself. While the functional link between perceived emotion and aggression was again observed in both cultures, the pattern was significantly more pronounced in the Japanese sample, reflecting cultural calibration in the interpretation of aggressive intent. These perceptions also shaped broader social evaluations: robust in-group advantage significantly influenced trust and prosociality ratings across both groups , even when group membership was only subjectively perceived.

Together, these projects reveal how evolved emotional functions interact with cultural norms to shape punishment decisions and social inference. The findings illuminate the mechanisms through which moral emotions maintain behavioral stability within cultures while navigating the interpretive demands—and systematic biases—of cross-cultural interaction.