Facial Expressions Are "Not Global"

An anonymous reader sends in a BBC report on new research out of Glasgow University, which detected differences in how facial expressions are read between Westerners and East Asians. Using eye tracking, the researchers determined that "people from different cultural groups observe different parts of the face when interpreting expression. East Asians participants tended to focus on the eyes of the other person, while Western subjects took in the whole face, including the eyes and the mouth." Interestingly, the researchers point out that the emoticons used online by the two groups reflect this difference.

Tracking and expression aren't the same thing

[wytcld]

This is about differences in how cultures track expressions, not in the expressions themselves. There's long been solid evidence that basic facial expressions are universal across human cultures, in their natural form. So if you're really smiling, it's the same muscles involved in much the same way, no matter what culture you're in. However, people also pretend to smile when it's not real. It's long been know that counterfeit expressions don't use all the same muscles, or the same overall pattern. People can be trained to spot this difference quite effectively.

Now, with this recent research showing that different cultures monitor expressions differently, this implies that good counterfeiting is going to be specific to which monitoring patterns it is trying to fool. That would be interesting research. It should show, for instance, that people are better at counterfeiting expressions to other people from their same culture. People from another culture should be better at seeing through your counterfeit expressions than people from your own culture, if that other culture focuses on different parts of the face than yours.

That cultures would focus differently fits with the extensive research on "joint attention." From infancy, we're wired to look at what we see other people looking at. We're very, very good a adopting the perceptual patterns of those around us, at a level that's almost automatic.

But contra the broad claim here, genuine emotions expressed through facial expressions are not culture-specific, but universal to humanity, essentially genetic.

ah, the inscrutable asian and the volatile gaijin

[circletimessquare]

http://www.csupomona.edu/~tassi/gestures.htm [csupomona.edu]

mutual incomprehensibility

co-author site

[mzs]

Here is the site of one of the co-authors:

http://www.psy.gla.ac.uk/staff/index.php?id=RJ002 [gla.ac.uk]

The article in question is not quite published yet:

Jack, R. E., Blais, C., Scheepers, C., Schyns, P. G., & Caldara, R. (in press) Cultural Confusions Show Facial Expressions are Not Universal Current Biology

Here is an earlier one using the same methodologies (PDF):

http://www.psy.gla.ac.uk/docs/download.php?type=PUBLS&id=1404 [gla.ac.uk]

It is about where western and eastern people look at faces using eye tracking when for example learning or recognizing a face. There were some subtle differences.