Korean Job Discussion Forums

[AgentM]

People from East Asia tend to have a tougher time than those from European countries telling the difference between a face that looks fearful versus surprised, disgusted versus angry, and now a new report published online on August 13th in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, explains why. Rather than scanning evenly across a face as Westerners do, Easterners fixate their attention on the eyes.

"We show that Easterners and Westerners look at different face features to read facial expressions," said Rachael E. Jack of The University of Glasgow. "Westerners look at the eyes and the mouth in equal measure, whereas Easterners favor the eyes and neglect the mouth. This means that Easterners have difficulty distinguishing facial expressions that look similar around the eye region."

The discovery shows that human communication of emotion is a lot more complex than experts had believed, according to the researchers led by Roberto Caldara at The University of Glasgow. As a result, facial expressions that had been considered universally recognizable cannot be used to reliably convey emotion in cross-cultural situations.

The researchers studied cultural differences in the recognition of facial expressions by recording the eye movements of 13 Western Caucasian and 13 East Asian people while they observed pictures of expressive faces and put them into categories: happy, sad, surprised, fearful, disgusted, angry, or neutral. The faces were standardized according to the so-called Facial Action Coding System (FACS) such that each expression displayed a specific combination of facial muscles typically associated with each feeling of emotion. They then compared how accurately participants read those facial expressions using their particular eye movement strategies.

It turned out that Easterners focused much greater attention on the eyes and made significantly more errors than Westerners did. The cultural specificity in eye movements that they show is probably a reflection of cultural specificity in facial expressions, Jack said. Their data suggest that while Westerners use the whole face to convey emotion, Easterners use the eyes more and mouth less.

http://www.physorg.com/news169385578.html
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This is interesting, especially for those of us who are or will be living in East Asia.

[Hater Depot]

But were they interpreting eastern or western faces?

[Fox]

I would have liked to see people from other regions included in this study, because there are at least two possibilities here:

1) These facial expressions aren't universal because they're simply cultural.

2) These facial expressions are to some extent universally ingrained, but certain cultures wean out those tendencies at a young age due to practices like encouraging the hiding of emotion.

Including people from other cultures across the globe could have provided some insight on that account.

[bacasper]

Another possibility is that the tendency to focus on the eyes vs. the whole face can also be culturally ingrained. The whole notion of privacy is different in the East vs. the West. In the West, we think nothing of asking, What are you thinking?" whereas in some Oriental cultures that is akin to a personal invasion.

According to Harvard psychologist William Pollock, author of Real Boys, in the West it is known that at birth, boys are more emotionally expressive than girls, but by age five the situation has reversed itself. This is thought to be due to socialization of boys to be "tough" and not show emotion.

A similar dynamic could be going on here.

[Privateer]

This study concludes emotions are universal (seems obvious to me but there was a surprising amount of resistance among some academics to the idea) but also that there...

[Privateer]

[bacasper]

[Julius]

Thank God for facial expressions! I miss them.

I'm real tired of the Korean stone face.

Try taking the 8.30am subway around seoul. Its scary.

[Fox]

[Ya-ta Boy]

I happened to use the BreakingNewsEnglish version of this report in a discussion class this afternoon. We did the T/F pre-reading section. Every one of the students acknowleged right off--without discussion--that Asians look mainly at the eyes and Westerners take into account the whole face. It wasn't controversial to them at all. They all knew it.

I have no idea what posters mean by 'stone face' anymore. In 1994 I knew what that meant. I could go days without seeing a smile on the street. Korean faces are amazingly animated these days compared to what prevailed back then.

Challenge: Show pictures of adult Westerners to your students and ask them to estimate the ages. I'll almost guarantee you that they are wrong by approximately 10 years. I'd say it's weird, but then I can't get any closer with their ages.

[Privateer]