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LONDON: Westerners ‘read’ facial expressions differently from Asians, paying more attention to the mouth than Asians who focus heavily on the eyes, says a new study.
And the oriental "neglect" of the mouth can lead to more mistakes in interpreting a person's emotion, said the report in Current Biology, describing how feelings can be "lost in translation."
"We show that Easterners and Westerners look at different face features to read facial expressions," said Rachael Jack, from the team at Glasgow University, in Scotland, who carried out the research.
Lost in translation
"Westerners look at the eyes and the mouth in equal measure, whereas Easterners favour the eyes and neglect the mouth. This means that Easterners have difficulty distinguishing facial expressions that look similar around the eye region."
In the study, western Caucasian and east Asian volunteers were asked to look at photographs of faces with seven basic emotional expressions: happy, sad, angry, disgust, fear, surprise and neutral.
The Asian participants had difficulty recognising facial expressions of fear and disgust, mistakenly interpreting them as surprise and anger instead, said the study.
"Unlike the Western participants who took clues from the whole face... the East Asian participants focused mainly on the eyes, where the information is often just too similar to discriminate some expressions.”
Cultural differences
Jack added: "Interestingly, although the eye region is ambiguous, subjects tended to bias their judgements towards less socially-threatening emotions – surprise rather than fear, for example.
"This perhaps highlights cultural differences when it comes to the social acceptability of emotions."
The report concluded that there were "genuine perceptual differences between Western Caucasian and East Asian observers" and said more research needs to be carried out.
"Otherwise, when it comes to communicating emotions across cultures, Easterners and Westerners will find themselves lost in translation," it said.
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so what
Interesting research, but so what?
why not using the tax payers money to do something better? for example pump more money into the public heath system.
Some researchers in the Uni just try to get funds doing something meaningless
Well
With increased interaction between the West and Asia, it makes sense to study how we might misunderstand one another because of cultural bias. These findings are not meaningless or useless. Now, if the research did not cost a lot to conduct, it is quite worthwhile.
RE: so what
Why bother doing anything, research like this helps in many different fields just because you don't know what its direct applications are doesn't mean that its worthless.
Also why bother complaining about the money not going to the health care system, many people view that as pointless to and would rather just get the percentage of a penny that their taxes contributed to this research back
Unanswered questions.
The unanswered questions:
1.Do Asian people interpret more accurately the facial expresssions of other Asians in comparison to Western facial expressions.
2.Do Westerners interpret more accurately the facial expressions of other Westerners in comparison to Asian facial expressions.
3.Is this difference cultural and behavioural, or independent of the location the particpants grew up in.
Simon V.
Sydney., 19/08/2009.
I agree!
I agree!