Emotion is all in the Eyes for East Asian People

Date: 2009 August 22 13:28

Posted by Joe

BBC News have published the details of a study by a team from Glasgow University. The study showed that different cultures read different facial expressions differently.

They discovered that East Asian participants in the study focused mainly on the eyes, but those from the west read the whole face.

"The paper states that the Eastern participants used a culturally specific decoding strategy that was inadequate to reliably distinguish the universal facial expressions of fear and disgust.

It concluded that information from the eyes is often ambiguous and confusing in these expressions, with consequences for cross-cultural communication and globalisation."

The researchers also cited the difference between western emoticons - :-) and Eastern emoticons - ^_^.