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East and West divided by a smile

If people learn there are cultural differences in facial expressions, they can deal with international communications and business effectively.

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HONG KONG: Dr Masaki Yuki’s e-mail signs off with a smiley, the stylised representation of a facial expression that symbolises a happy state of being. But the smiley from Yuki, an Associate Professor in the Department of Behavioural Science in Japan’s Hokkaido University, isn’t the same dots-and-dashes emoticon [ :-) ] that SMS users are familiar with. Instead, it has distinctly “East Asian characteristics”, with markedly pronounced eyes, like this: ^_^

That iconic difference is symbolic of the cultural divide between ‘East’ and ‘West’, which influences the manner in which people from different regions interpret facial emotions, says a pioneering collaborative research study by Yuki and his professional peers Dr William Maddux (at Northwestern University in Chicago) and Dr Takahiko Masuda (at the University of Atlanta in Edmonton). 

Their research findings, published in The Journal of Experimental Social Psychology under the title “Are the windows to the soul the same in the East and West?”, establish that in cultures where emotional expressions are controlled or subdued – in Japan, for instance – people look to the eyes to interpret emotions in others. Whereas in cultures where emotion is openly expressed, such as the US, the focus is on the mouth to interpret emotion.

“The research is the first to demonstrate that people from different cultures tend to weight cues differently in different parts of the face when interpreting emotional expressions,” the authors say in their study. “These findings go against the popular theory that the facial expressions of basic emotions can be universally recognised.”

In an interview to DNA, Yuki said the study’s findings held significance for inter-cultural communication. “For instance, Japanese international exchange students who study in the US often have trouble communicating with their American friends because their facial expressions are misunderstood…” Such “miscommunications” could be problematic in international/inter-cultural business situations, he adds. “If people learn that there are cultural differences in facial expressions, they can deal with international and inter-cultural communications and business more effectively.”

As part of the research study, the participants — US and Japanese students — were initially shown computer-generated emoticons with several combinations of happy and sad eyes and mouths. The participants were required to complete a questionnaire and ‘rate’ the emotional expressions of the illustrated faces based on how ‘happy’ or ‘sad’ they appeared. 

The findings were unambiguous: the Japanese students rated happy-eyes faces as happier and sad-eyes faces as sadder than the American students; the Americans, on the other hand, rated happy-mouth faces as happier and sad-mouth faces as sadder than the Japanese did.

In the second experiment, participants were asked to interpret the emotional expressions of photographs of real individuals; the photographs had, however, been digitally altered to create faces with different combinations of mouths and eyes in varying states of happiness, sadness and neutrality. The results replicated those from the first one: the eyes emerged as the most prominent facial cue for Japanese and the mouth emerging as the most prominent cue for Americans.

“We believe the current studies have a variety of important implications,” say the authors. “They offer one explanation why in many ethnographic accounts, Japanese are often said to be expressionless or inscrutable. It is possible that expressions by Japanese may tend to involve more of the eyes and less of the mouth than is typically the case for Westerners.”

What makes us different?

In an interview to DNA, Dr Masaki Yuki explains the significance of the findings.

Can the findings be extrapolated to people from East Asia and from the West, in general?

Yes. Empirical studies have confirmed East Asians — as Japanese, Koreans, and Chinese — are ‘interdependent’, who emphasise interpersonal relationships and harmony (which is one basis for emotion regulation), whereas Westerners, including Americans, Canadians, and British, are ‘independent’, with emphasis on autonomy and assertiveness (which is one factor in the exaggerated expression of emotion).

Can the findings be used some day in forensic investigations by observing expressions of suspects?

I’m not sure. The famous researcher Paul Ekman has studied the detection of fake facial expressions.

Don’t cultural differences between the East and the West extend to areas beyond just interpretation of facial emotions?

Exactly! There has been huge evidence accumulating, in the area called “cultural psychology”, as to the psychological differences between East Asians and Westerners. The two cultural groups are found to differ in self-esteem, impact of self-esteem on happiness, why they feel identified and work for one’s groups, the belief in what determines people’s behaviour, and so on.

Do studies like these stereotype races?

Not at all. We identify that cultural norms, rather than ‘race’ (in its genetic sense), are the cause for the difference. The implication from this is that it is possible that, even within the same ‘culture’, the mode of people’s facial expression and perception may change, according to changes in the context.

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