Khushang Zaveri
2025
Social Norms in Cinema: A Cross-Cultural Analysis of Shame, Pride and Prejudice
Sunny Rai
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Khushang Zaveri
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Shreya Havaldar
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Soumna Nema
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Lyle Ungar
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Sharath Chandra Guntuku
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Shame and pride are social emotions expressed across cultures to motivate and regulate people’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. In this paper, we introduce the first cross-cultural dataset of over 10k shame/pride-related expressions with underlying social expectations from ~5.4K Bollywood and Hollywood movies. We examine *how* and *why* shame and pride are expressed across cultures using a blend of psychology-informed language analysis combined with large language models. We find significant cross-cultural differences in shame and pride expression aligning with known cultural tendencies of the USA and India – e.g., in Hollywood, shame-expressions predominantly discuss *self* whereas shame is expressed toward *others* in Bollywood. Women are more sanctioned across cultures and for violating similar social expectations.