Slashdot Mirror
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.
Anyone in the MMORPG world could've summarized this!
people are indeed different.
there is no spoon
^_^
:D
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
That is not really a surprising discovery. There are differences in the way people show agreement and disagreement in different areas. In fact there are interesting differences in the way people show how they liked the food in different nations and the same actions can mean entirely opposite things in different countries. I guess the implications of this discovery are interesting for robot developers and AI.
In today's Metro, there's an interesting article on this same subject. When we use emoticons such as ;-), people on the other side of the world shrug their shoulders. That's because Westerners read faces differently to Eastern people experts claim.
It goes on later - Whereas we tend to use the mouth to express emotions such as :-) for happy and :-( for sad, Eastern emoticons use the eyes ^.^ for happy and ;.; for sad. The findings could mean concepts of 'universal expression' of emotions are wrong - and do not take into account cultural boundaries, the experts said.
Interesting but again who are these so-called experts. According to the article, only 13 Europeans and 13 people from China, Japan and Korea were asked to put a series of faces into categories such as sad and surprised. Hardly a global representation I'd have thought but then again statistics, statistics and statistics, as the saying goes. I'm sure even Mr Spock would have thought this was 'fascinating'. :)
In order to convince me, they'd have to find that East Asians form expressions with just their eyes that other East Asians can pick up more easily than Westerners. It makes no sense that East Asians can't read each other's facial expressions.
The exact thing has been written in many of the "manga" technique books or books comparing eastern and western comics I've read.
The title of the summary says that facial expressions are not global, but the summary says that the way people read facial expressions varies in different geographical areas. A more interesting test would be how accurate people from East Asia are at reading the facial expressions of Westerners and vice versa.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
I wonder if this has any impact on "lie detection" approach of reading very short-lived transient expressions. Are these global?
At first I was (:^O)
but then I \(^o^)/
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.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
This extraordinary conclusion reached with two groups of 13 people, one East Asian, the other Western. Well, that's that settled then.
ANGER. FEAR. SURPRISE. SADNESS. JOY. DISGUST.
These six emotional responses produce identical facial expressions globally, including interactions of these (surprise + joy at a gift opening, frinstance), as long as that's the only input. Anything more, and the facial expression as well as interpretation of it (say, pride mixed in since the gift was from your child who made it by hand being mixed with the other two), is open to cultural differences.
That was a single paragraph summary of facial expressions, global or not. It was old when I learned it in undergrad psych. TFA has nothing to do with facial expressions. It has to do with face scanning. It has nothing to say about facial expressions other than as the object being observed, and so has nothing to say on whether any are global or not.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
http://www.csupomona.edu/~tassi/gestures.htm
mutual incomprehensibility
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Take a look at Japanese animation (google image search "animne") and compare it to the comics in most American newspapers. Notice any differences? (hint: Anime eyes are huge!) Local artists know what to exploit. To the East it's the eyes. That hasn't caught on so much in America because we look at the whole face and are distracted when features aren't proportionate.
Here is the site of one of the co-authors:
http://www.psy.gla.ac.uk/staff/index.php?id=RJ002
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
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.
The study is about how different people focus on different parts of the face. That doesn't have anything to do with which facial expressions relate to what thoughts/emotions.
There are two facial expressions that have the same universal meaning in every culture, expressed with the emotions of joy and disgust. Everything else has a cultural-context to varying degrees, but if you eat something that tastes horrible -- that face you make will be understood by anyone.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
May 2007
Re: emoticons and east asia (japan) focusing on eyes:
http://science.slashdot.org/story/07/05/13/059239/Culture-Determines-Which-Emoticon-You-Use
from 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
to 45 2F 6E 40 3C DF 10 71 4E 41 DF AA 25 7D 31 3F
mutual incomprehensibility
I'll say. That site is the least comprehensible shade of yellow I think I can imagine.
+++OUT OF CHEESE ERROR+++ REDO FROM START +++
It's interesting in that some expressions are universal due to a biological basis, but some are cultural.
Quite true.
Smiling with teeth for humans is a universal expression of happiness. Or at least near universal. But for most other mammals, showing teeth is a sign of aggression and anger.
Cat got your tongue? (something important seems to be missing from your comment ... like the body or the subject!)
Comparing caricatures with realistic depiction of humans? Come on... That ain't even a proper straw-man.
Try these instead:
Japanse Spiderman manga vs. American Spiderman Comic.
Note how lips, nostrils and ears are generally unarticulated (particularly noses and ears that often are not present at all, or are just hinted) and how much more detailed american (comic) faces are.
On the other hand... manga artists attribute much greater attention to eyes and hair.
You can tell the character by his/her eyes immediately.
Bigger and more detailed the eyes - more innocent the character. Slits with a tiny dot for a pupil - evil fucker.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I look at women's tits and men's fists... or my iphone. Who needs faces?
See, they aren't like us, after all. Probably not even the same type of insect. We butterflies must not let the moths prevail. Ready the nuclear cannons, and prepare for the ultimate war!
This is my sig.
They way they shake their heads when saying yes completely fucks with my mind every time!
Drill baby drill - on Mars
The article did not address the questions of definitions. Do we define words like "fear" and "surprise" the same way? Fear and surprise can be related - and where does shock fit in? Perhaps its not just a question of interpreting the emotions differently, but also an issue of applying different words to the same emotion. I see a shocked expression, but I have to assign it a value of "fear" or "surprise" - even if I have a perfect empathy for the emotion expressed in the picture, the word I choose will depend on how I've seen that word used in the past.
Given that the test was given to people from different backgrounds, they likely grew up speaking different languages. Even though presumably the East Asian subjects may have learned English, their understandings of some English words may be based on translations of their native words, and the words may not be exact matches.
One might suggest that this problem can be dodged by asking the subjects for a suggested physical response rather than for a word. Instead of "Is this person feeling 'fear' or 'surprise'" you might ask "Is this person thinking of running away or is this person thinking that he didn't expect what just happened" but even then cultural expectations about behavior would play a heavy role.
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
So maybe there really *is* a reason that Japanese Anime is drawn with such large eyes.
My favorite is when I receive emails from Office Managers or non informed employees who have smiley programs installed and think that everyone can see their smilies that I receive as a capital letter 'J'
13 + 13 people? And results from such utterly irrelevant sample are supposed to make news?
Yeah, Slashdot, 'stuff that matters" indeed.
Catalin Braescu
Ofaly.com
this is running amok:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falling_down
in other words, running amok is nothing unique to malay culture, its just their term for it, like the americans call it going postal. all cultures have dudes who, for various reasons, external and internal, crack and start murdering left and right without apparent warning
give me any example of a behavior "unique" to a certain culture, and you can, if you are intellectualy honest, find examples of that behavior in every other culture under different names
human nature is a constant across all societies and all time
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I don't believe that for a second. No one has had a 'hankering' for at least 40 years.
Support the EFF and Creative Commons. The war is coming, and they're supporting you...
One study that I want to see done, that is in the same spirit as this one, is to figure out what features people from different cultures focus on when identifying a person. While this study shows that Asians tend to focus on the eyes and Westerners look at the face holistically, I wonder if that ports to person identification. Might shed some light on the "You all look the same" comments from both sides.
I don't grok this one, and since we can't google punctuation....
2^3 * 31 * 647
Speaking as a European, IMHO every single remark about europe made in this article is either wrong or very misleading.
It's the eyes! Nothing else matters!
He just keeps them closed. You know... playing it cool.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
The headline is WRONG. Actually it's peoples reading of expressions that's "not global".
It's the difference between talking and listening - related but opposite activities.
"East Asians participants tended to focus on the eyes of the other person"
I could have told you that just from watching kung fu movies.
=S