Abstract: Going beyond the debate of universals and cultural differences in recognizing emotion, it is unanimously agreed that the emotion recognition has incorporated both universals and cultural differences. Recent studies have demonstrated that there is an in-group advantage in recognizing emotion, meaning that people are more accurate when emotions are both expressed and recognized by members of the same culture. The dialect theory provides the theoretical support for in-group advantage. The in-group advantage has a methodologically controversy. The future studies will need to pay closer attention to methodological sound of emotion stimulus, and further explore the differences in the dimension of individual personality or emotion of the in-group advantage and some other perceiving cues of this effect.

Key words: emotion recognition, cultural differences, in-group advantage, dialect theory, expression emotion