Abstract Research of facial emotion has achieved a great of improvement since 1990s, especially in the cultural differences in the perception of facial emotion. This study aims to study the influence of the background facial emotion on the perception of an individual’s emotion in the Chinese and Western cultural context. 　　The data were collected through the central emotion judgment task and emotion recognition task with a sample of 30 college students in China and 30 college students in USA. 45 emotion pictures from JACFEE were used. 　　In judging people’s facial emotions, Chinese were more susceptible to background facial emotion than American. The reaction time of Chinese participants’ judgment of central facial emotion with the background facial emotions was significant longer than one of central facial emotion without the background facial emotions; When the background facial emotion were consistent with the central facial emotion, Chinese participants judged the intensity of central facial emotion greater; when the background facial emotion were inconsistent with the central facial emotion, Chinese participants judged the intensity of central facial emotion weaker. However, American participants’ judgment of central facial emotion wasn’t influenced by background facial emotion. When the background facial emotion was changed, the recognition accuracy of Chinese participants was significant higher than one of American participants. 　　The background emotional stimulus as perceived would be different for Americans and Chinese, that when Americans infer a person’s emotion, they focus on the person, whereas Chinese attend to the whole social background.