When confronted with a person in distress, women are more likely than men to express emotion about the situation, even though the levels of physiological arousal for the two sexes are the same. In some stressful situations men and women label what they are feeling differently. Women also tend to be better at decoding emotional expression and tend to regulate their own expression more than men.

The individualism/collectivism dimension helps to explain the diversity across cultures in the experience of emotions. Members of collectivist cultures, for example, tend to have many terms for other-focused emotions, have emotions of shorter duration, and promote emotional displays that are designed to maintain group cohesion.

Facial expressions of the primary emotions appear to have a universal quality: The face shows a similar expression for a given emotion regardless of the cultural background of the expressor. These cross-cultural findings run counter to the culture-learning view, which suggests that facial expressions of emotion are learned within a particular culture.

Overlaying the universal expression of emotion are display rules, which govern when it is appropriate to show emotion: to whom, by whom, and under what circumstances. These do tend to differ from culture to culture. Common display rules include intensification, deintensification, masking, and neutralizing.

Other forms of nonverbal communication vary more from culture to culture than facial expressions do. Understanding the way emotion is communicated in a cultural context requires knowing both the universal aspects of such communication and the cultural rules that govern in the specific communication setting.