Cultural Confusions Show that Facial Expressions Are Not Universal

Abstract

Central to all human interaction is the mutual understanding of emotions, achieved primarily by a set of biologically rooted social signals evolved for this purpose-facial expressions of emotion. Although facial expressions are widely considered to be the universal language of emotion, some negative facial expressions consistently elicit lower recognition levels among Eastern compared to Western groups (see [4] for a meta-analysis and [5, 6] for review). Here, focusing on the decoding of facial expression signals, we merge behavioral and computational analyses with novel spatiotemporal analyses of eye movements, showing that Eastern observers use a culture-specific decoding strategy that is inadequate to reliably distinguish universal facial expressions of "fear" and "disgust." Rather than distributing their fixations evenly across the face as Westerners do, Eastern observers persistently fixate the eye region. Using a model information sampler, we demonstrate that by persistently fixating the eyes, Eastern observers sample ambiguous information, thus causing significant confusion. Our results question the universality of human facial expressions of emotion, highlighting their true complexity, with critical consequences for cross-cultural communication and globalization.

Grist and mills: on the cultural origins of cultural learning

“…Thus, the input mechanisms, or psychological 'mills', that modulate social learning have characteristics that are culturally inherited-e.g. offspring inherit from their cultural parents a tendency to focus on the eyes, or on the eyes and mouth, when viewing facial expressions of emotion [31]-and these mill characteristics influence the 'grist' that is culturally inherited through social learning-e.g. beliefs about what kinds of foods are and are not disgusting.…”

“…In this study, Jack et al [31] used eye movement tracking to measure attention to emotional faces in Western Caucasian and East Asian participants. Across all emotion types and face ethnicities, they found that Western Caucasians divided their attention more equally between the eyes and mouth than the East Asians, who focussed more on the eyes.…”

Facial expressions of emotion are not culturally universal

“…Specifically, the universality hypothesis proposes that six basic internal human emotions (i.e., happy, surprise, fear, disgust, anger, and sad) are expressed using the same facial movements across all cultures (4-7), supporting universal recognition. However, consistent cross-cultural disagreement about the emotion (8)(9)(10)(11)(12)(13) and intensity (8)(9)(10)(14)(15)(16) conveyed by gold standard universal facial expressions (17) now questions the universality hypothesis.…”

Improving recognition and identification of facial areas involved in Non-Verbal Communication by feature selection

“…It may be possible to investigate if other cultures use different areas of the face for NVC perception, based on feature selection. Gaze patterns are culturally dependent for emotion recognition [12]. However, humans may be using different areas of the face for recognition compared to an automatic system, and the current feature extraction process is not expected to be as comprehensive as human perception.…”

“…[2]), which can make comprehension of the overall distribution difficult. In experimental psychology, gaze patterns in perception have been visualised by Jack et al [12].…”