Takahiko Masuda (増田 貴彦, Masuda Takahiko) is a cultural psychologist and professor of psychology at the University of Alberta.
[2] In perhaps his most popular study, Masuda displayed a series of images with characters of varied emotional expression.
There was a distinct measurable difference in the way North Americans and Japanese perceived the emotion of the central figure of the image, such that for North Americans the perception of the emotion of the central figure was not affected by whether or not the figures in the background showed a congruent emotion.
Whereas the Japanese participants were markedly influenced in their judgement of the central figures emotional state depending on the emotional states of the surrounding figure.
[3] Masuda runs an active research lab at the University of Alberta, where he supervises a number of graduate and undergraduate research projects while conducting his own research.