It is well-documented that how we convey emotion is heavily modulated by our personality traits (e.g. gender) and by our environment (e.g. ethnic background). For example, in the case of facial expression, female observers perform better in discriminating or recognizing different expressions than males. The other-race effect (ORE) is a phenomenon in which individuals can recognize or discriminate facial expression of their own ethnic background better compared to faces of other ethnic background. Our goal is to develop a computational model based on multidimensional signal detection theory to capture these modulating factors in order to facilitate international communication understanding.