Nevco News
September 2009
Volume 2, Issue 9
Cultural Differences in Recognizing Emotion
| People from East Asia tend to have a tougher time than those
from European countries telling the difference between a face
that looks fearful versus surprised, disgusted versus angry, and
now a new report published online on August 13th in Current
Biology, a Cell Press publication, explains why. Rather than
scanning evenly across a face as Westerners do, Easterners
fixate their attention on the eyes. The discovery shows that human communication of emotion is a lot more complex than experts had believed, according to the researchers led by Roberto Caldara at The University of Glasgow. As a result, facial expressions that had been considered universally recognizable cannot be used to reliably convey emotion in cross-cultural situations. The researchers studied cultural differences in the recognition of facial expressions by recording the eye movements of 13 Western Caucasian and 13 East Asian |
people while they observed pictures of expressive faces and
put them into categories: happy, sad, surprised, fearful,
disgusted, angry, or neutral. The faces were standardized
according to the so-called Facial Action Coding System (FACS).
They then compared how accurately participants read those facial
expressions using their particular eye movement strategies. It turned out that Easterners focused much greater attention on the eyes and made significantly more errors than Westerners did. Their data suggest that while Westerners use the whole face to convey emotion, Easterners use the eyes more and mouth less. A survey of Eastern versus Western emoticons certainly supports that idea. "Emoticons are used to convey different emotions in cyberspace as they are the iconic representation of facial expressions," Jack said. "Interestingly, there are clear cultural differences in the formations of these icons." |
Western emoticons primarily use the mouth to convey
emotional states, e.g. : ) for happy and : ( for sad, she noted,
whereas Eastern emoticons use the eyes, e.g. ^.^ for happy and
;_; for sad. "In sum," the researchers wrote, "our data demonstrate genuine perceptual differences between Western Caucasian and East Asian observers and show that FACS-coded facial expressions are not universal signals of human emotion. From here on, examining how the different facets of cultural ideologies and concepts have diversified these basic social skills will elevate knowledge of human emotion processing from a reductionist to a more authentic representation. Otherwise, when it comes to communicating emotions across cultures, Easterners and Westerners will find themselves lost in translation." Cell Press (2009, August 16). Facial Expressions Show Language Barriers, Too. ScienceDaily. Retrieved August 17, 2009 |
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