Are the windows to the soul the same in the East and West? Cultural differences in using the eyes and mouth as cues to recognize emotions in Japan and the United States

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Abstract

The current research investigated the hypothesis that, depending on an individual’s cultural background, facial cues in different parts of the face are weighted differently when interpreting emotions. Given that the eyes are more difficult to control than the mouth when people express emotions, we predicted that individuals in cultures where emotional subduction is the norm (such as Japan) would focus more strongly on the eyes than the mouth when interpreting others’ emotions. By contrast, we predicted that people in cultures where overt emotional expression is the norm (such as the US) would tend to interpret emotions based on the position of the mouth, because it is the most expressive part of the face. This hypothesis was confirmed in two studies, one using illustrated faces, and one using edited facial expressions from real people, in which emotional expressions in the eyes and mouth were independently manipulated. Implications for our understanding of cross-cultural psychology, as well of the psychology of emotional interpretation, are discussed.

Section snippets

Emotions and facial cues

Although emotion recognition and emotion expression are two distinct and separate psychological phenomena, our hypothesis concerning cultural differences in emotion recognition is based on cultural differences in how emotions are expressed in different cultures. Researchers have noted that cultures of individualism or independence emphasize the direct and explicit expression of emotions (e.g., Markus & Kitayama, 1991). In fact, in Western cultures, where people tend to have an independent

Study 1

Our initial empirical investigation concerned the construals of emotions as displayed in computer emoticons. Emoticons are combinations of certain keystrokes that combine to form an approximate facial expression, which can be used to convey the emotional state of the writer. For example, in the United States the emoticons

and
denote a happy face, whereas the emoticons
or
denote a sad face. However, Japanese tend to use the symbol
to indicate a happy face, and
to indicate a sad (or crying)

Study 2

In study 2, we examined participants’ interpretations of emotional expressions of photographs of real individuals. However, to control experimentally the degree to which the cues in the eyes and mouth were happy, sad, or neutral, we used computer software to create faces with different combinations of mouths and eyes taken from pre-validated happy, sad, and neutral faces of real individuals (Ekman, 1976). Ten different faces were selected, and each face was edited to form the six combinations

General discussion

To the authors’ knowledge, the present research is the first to demonstrate that people from different cultures tend to weight facial cues differently when interpreting emotional expressions. Across two studies, one using emotional expressions in facial icons and one using computer-edited photographs of real faces, results showed that compared to Japanese, Americans weighted cues displayed in the mouth more when judging emotions, whereas Japanese tended to weight cues in the eyes more than

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by a Grant-in-Aid for COE Research to the Center for the Study of Cultural and Ecological Foundations of the Mind at Hokkaido University from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, and a post-doctoral research grant to William W. Maddux from the Dispute Resolution Research Center at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. The authors give special thanks to Jacquie Vorauer for her valuable input on earlier versions of this manuscript. We

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