Different cultures read facial expressions differently

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http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8199951.stm
Could have obvious relevance for autism

interesting. For anecdotal evidence, i found myself looking at the mouth of the pictures before the eyes.

As for the emoticons i never realized some of those were actually asian in origin. Though in hindsight, looking at anime it should be rather obvious.

Interesting.

On an allied track - When I taught school many of the young Asian (sorry, cannot remember the country now) and some of the Central-American children did not maintain direct eye contact when spoken to. I noted that to some established colleagues and some said that it was a cultural thing, that to have stared at me while I spoke would have been rude, as I was the adult/higher-status person in the conversation.

I never knew how true it was, but it seems plausible.

Interesting and perhaps why traditonally in most east asian theaters, they accent the facial features especially the eyes with a lot of makeup to tradionally emphasize a "facial expression". Although I would think with all the influences from western cultures in some eastern asian countries, there would be less and less of the differences in emphasis.

I've seen research along these lines evolving over the years. And it's consistent with my experience, since I spent part of my life in Japan and am fluent in Japanese and English. As an anecdotal aside, I'm equally non-fluent in both American and Japanese cultures.

I remember a news story from a couple of years ago.

A tourist was swimming in Greece and he started swimming into a restricted military area.

A guard saw the swimmer and motioned him to come in by raising his hand palm down and waving his fingers.

To us that means "goodbye" so the swimmer turned around and the guard shot him!.


Here's the problem. To us palm down means goodbye and palm up means come here.

Talk about a "problem in communication"

also, in Africa and much of the Middle East, 'thumbs up' there means the same thing as 'the finger' here. Iraqi kids gleefully give American soldiers the 'thumbs up', not knowing what it means.

On the lighter side, during the Cold War, a few captured Americans gave North Korean guards 'the finger', explaining it was a 'good luck' sign.

I'm just wondering how this would affect diagnosis and noticing someone was autistic.

One hand, I can look at faces but usually avoid the eyes, therefore I'd be far worse of in Asia.

On the other hand, reading eye might be easier than reading faces because surely there are less possible 'expressions' you could pull, so one means of noticing autism might not be available to them.

what the ?! o.o I noticed i use the "East" emoticons more than the West ones.... They do seem to make more sense though o.O .

E-motivation topic

if not for the internet emoticons, I would not know much about facial expressions.

Were the Westerners shown only Western faces and the East Asians shown only East Asian faces? Or were the volunteers shown a variety of faces? The article doesn't say. Perhaps people perceive facial expressions in different ways depending on whose face they are looking at.
I'd be (faintly) interested to know where the experimenters get these happy-sad-disgusted images from in the first place. Because I thought NTs were supposed to be good at spotting when people are faking it. Maybe they recruit professional actors!