The Eyes Have It: Culture and Emotional Cues

by Jordan Yerman | May 13, 2007 at 06:19 am

583 views | 0 Recommendations | 0 comments

Ultimately, people around the world seem to want the same things: happiness, security, a home, food on the table, and a snazzier mobile phone than the person on their right or left. However, our culture and surroundings affect how we approach others, and we only notice it when we interact with someone from a very different place than us.

For example, I came across this article as I scanned today's headlines; it's about how Japanese and Americans look to different parts of the face to guage emotion, and how that difference translates into emoticons. For example, Americans do the smiley as :) [emphasis on the mouth], whilst Japanese texters do it like ^_^ [emphasis on the eyes].

Similarly, our languages and accents dictate how we imitate noises heard in nature, such as a dog barking.

[W]hen Yuki entered graduate school and began communicating with American scholars over e-mail, he was often confused by their use of emoticons such as smiley faces :) and sad faces, or :(.

"It took some time before I finally understood that they were faces," he wrote in an e-mail. In Japan, emoticons tend to emphasize the eyes, such as the happy face (^_^) and the sad face (;_;). "After seeing the difference between American and Japanese emoticons, it dawned on me that the faces looked exactly like typical American and Japanese smiles," he said.

Intrigued, Yuki decided to study this phenomenon. First, he and his colleagues asked groups of American and Japanese students to rate how happy or sad various computer-generated emoticons seemed to them. As Yuki predicted, the Japanese gave more weight to the emoticons' eyes when gauging emotions, whereas Americans gave more weight to the mouth. For example, the American subjects rated smiling emoticons with sad-looking eyes as happier than the Japanese subjects did.

Then he and his colleagues manipulated photographs of real faces to control the degree to which the eyes and the mouth were happy, sad or neutral. Again, the researchers found that Japanese subjects judged expressions based more on the eyes than the Americans, who looked to the mouth.