Beyond culture and language: Tracing emotional distance through facial expressions in Netflix trailers

This study explores cross-national emotional differences in media consumption by analyzing Netflix movie trailers. Emotional scores were extracted from the top 10 trailers per month across 28 countries in 2022 using facial recognition and machine learning. Each country’s emotional profile was constructed, and emotional distance between countries was measured. These emotional distances were then compared with six socio-cultural indicators: language, culture, religion, genetics, geography, and economy. A gravity model framework was employed to assess how these factors influence emotional distance across country pairs. Results show that religious, genetic, and geographic distances significantly predict emotional distance, whereas language, cultural distance, and GDP per capita do not. However, subsequent mediation analyses reveal that genre distance significantly mediates the relationship between linguistic and cultural distances and emotional distance, indicating that their influence operates indirectly through differences in genre composition rather than through direct emotional alignment. This suggests that emotional similarity between nations is more closely linked to deep-rooted historical and social factors than to economic or linguistic proximity. By introducing emotional distance as a novel metric, the study offers a new framework for understanding global media engagement beyond conventional cultural and economic analyses.