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Abstract European Americans view high-intensity, open-mouthed ‘excited’ smiles more positively than Chinese because they value excitement and other high arousal positive states more. This difference is supported by reward-related neural activity, with European Americans showing greater Nucleus Accumbens (NAcc) activity to excited (vs calm) smiles than Chinese. But do these cultural differences generalize to all rewards, and are they related to real-world social behavior? European American (N = 26) and Chinese (N = 27) participants completed social and monetary incentive delay tasks that distinguished between the anticipation and receipt (outcome) of social and monetary rewards while undergoing Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (FMRI). The groups did not differ in NAcc activity when anticipating social or monetary rewards. However, as predicted, European Americans showed greater NAcc activity than Chinese when viewing excited smiles during outcome (the receipt of social reward). No cultural differences emerged when participants received monetary outcomes. Individuals who showed increased NAcc activity to excited smiles during outcome had friends with more intense smiles on social media. These findings suggest that culture plays a specific role in modulating reward-related neural responses to excited smiles during outcome, which are associated with real-world relationships. 

When playing single-shot behavioral economic games like the Trust and Dictator Games, European Americans and East Asians invested in and gave more to targets whose smiles matched their culture’s idealaffect (the affective states they value; Blevins et al., 2024; Park et al., 2017), suggesting that smiles signal something about targets’ traits. But what happens when participants are given direct information about targets’ traits; do targets’ smiles still matter for resource sharing? To answer this question, we conducted four studies from 2019 to 2022 in which 429 European Americans and 413 Taiwanese played single-shot Trust Games with open, toothy “excited” smiling targets, closed “calm” smiling targets, and nonsmiling “neutral” targets that varied in their reputations for being trustworthy, competent, and emotionally stable. When targets’ reputations were ambiguous (e.g., “50% of previous players said they were trustworthy”), European American and Taiwanese participants invested more in targets whose smiles matched their culture’s ideal affect. However, when targets’ reputations were clearly good (e.g., “80% of previous players said they were trustworthy”) or bad (e.g., “20% of previous players said they were trustworthy”), European Americans invested equally in all targets, suggesting that reputational information about targets’ traits mattered more than targets’ smiles. The pattern for Taiwanese, however, differed: Taiwanese invested equally in calm and neutral targets when targets’ reputations were clear, but regardless of their reputations, Taiwanese invested in excited targets the least. We discuss the implications of these findings for understanding cultural differences in the meaning of an excited smile in the context of resource sharing. 

Well-being 2030 has become the latest rationale for the OECD’s education work. This vision has given rise to new assessments of student well-being beginning with PISA 2015. The OECD, recognising the problems of PISA 2015, conceptualised a wider student well-being construct in PISA 2018, and attempted to measure ‘students’ feelings’. However, analyses of the OECD’s affective turn reveal major problems remain. Our critique is empirically underpinned by an innovative analytical strategy: comparing PISA 2018 student questionnaire translations across different ‘economies’ that use the same written language (China, Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan). Our analyses confirm that the OECD imagines a cultural and context-free world, one in which translation and measurements are simply technical problems to be engineered, rather than deeper ‘problems’ of worldviews that require attunement. To encourage the OECD to recognise these differences in its future assessments, we offer starting points from recent research in cultural psychology.