The meaning of facial expressions also carries cultural characteristics

East Asians are often more difficult than Europeans to distinguish a frightened face with a surprised face, or a disgusted face with an angry face. Now, a report in the online Current Biology on August 13 explained the reason: instead of observing all over the face like Europeans, East Asians often only focus attention on the couple. eye.

'We have shown that Eastern people and Westerners will look at different positions to read the true feelings behind a face,' said Rachael E. Jack, a lecturer at Glasgow University. 'Westerners often divide their attention on the eyes and mouth, while Eastern people often only pay attention to the eye part and ignore the mouth. This means that Eastern people have a harder time distinguishing between similar eye-shaped facial expressions. '

The team's findings, led by Professor Roberto Caldara from Glasgow University, show that people's emotional expression is more complex than experts once thought. As a result, facial expressions that were once thought to be of unified significance around the world turned out not to be interpreted the same in all cultural situations.

Research sheds light on different cultures acting out facial expressions in different ways. ( Photo: iStockphoto / Joan Vicent Cantó Roig)

The researchers examined cultural differences in reading facial expressions by recording eye movements of 13 Europeans and 13 East Asians as they observed images of faces and divided them into group: happy, sad, surprised, scared, aversion, angry, and neutral. Faces are standardized according to the Face Activity Encryption system (FACS), in which each facial expression is a combination of muscles with an emotional state.
As a result, East Asians focus their attention on the eyes and commit more mistakes than Europeans. Cultural characteristics in eye movements may be a reflection of the cultural traits of facial expressions, Jack said. Data show that while Europeans use the entire face to find expressive emotions, East Asians pay more attention to the eyes but less attention to the subject's mouth.

The survey of Eastern and Western smileys also showed similar results.

'Smilies are often used to express different emotions in the virtual world because they are symbolic faces,' says Jack. 'Interestingly, there are distinct cultural differences in these symbols.' Western smiley signs mainly use mouth to express emotional state, such as:) to express joy and: (to express sadness, while signifying the smiley of the East mainly use eyes, for example ^. ^ means fun, and; _; is sad.

'In summary,' the research team concludes, 'the research data shows the difference in the face meaning reading between Westerners and Eastern people, and indicates that the FACS system brings meaning. Encoded facial expressions are not a global standard system of human emotions. In a multicultural communication environment, Eastern people and Westerners need to pay attention to not express their feelings wrongly and misinterpret emotional content on the face of the opposite person. '