Perceptions of facial expressions differ across cultures

Facial expressions have been called the "universal language of emotion," but people from different cultures perceive happy, sad or angry facial expressions in unique ways, according to new research from the University of Glasgow. Facial Recognition [mp3] Scotsman: Happy or sad face? Depends on your culture Fifteen Chinese people and 15 Caucasians living in Glasgow took part in the study. They viewed emotion-neutral faces that were randomly altered on a computer screen and then categorized the facial expressions as happy, sad, surprised, fearful, disgusted or angry. The responses allowed researchers to identify the expressive facial features that participants associated with each emotion. Rachael Jack who co-authored the project with Professor Philippe Schyns director of the Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology at the University of Glasgow, and Professor Roberto Caldara of the University of Fribourg in Switzerland, said: "By conducting this project, we hoped to show that people from different cultures think about facial expressions in different ways. What we found was that East Asians and Western Caucasians differ in terms of the features they think constitute an angry face or a happy face." Existing research supports the notion that facial expressions are a hard-wired human behaviour with evolutionary origins, implying that facial expressions should not differ across cultures. But this study challenges that theory and used statistical image processing techniques to examine how study participants perceived facial expressions through their own mental representations.