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Or why Asians misunderstand Europeans and vice versa. I came across an interesting article in “Der Spiegel” a once renowned German magazine. Well, from time to time they still publish good articles it seems. As it is in German I would like to share the ideas of this one with you here on my blog.

Anger, fear, suprise, disgust, joy and sorrow are known as the six emotions on the face that are accepted as a global language. But more and more doubts are arising if it is really a fact. A new study shows that Asians have huge problems to read the mimic of Europeans, so do Europeans with interpretating Asian mimic.

For the social interaction between humans these expressions are enormously important because we express our feelings towards others this way and of course we are reading the emotions of those other people, too. But especially the negative emotions like fear, anger and disgust seem to cause problems between Asians and Europeans. The Asians can not interpret our moving faces and on the other hand we find Asian faces very stiff and unemotional.

The key lies in the different “decoding” methods. Asians mostly concentrate on the eyes whereas for Europeans the mouth region is also important for the mimic.

That’s the reason why we use different emoticons:

The European smiling face is
The Asian smiling face is ^.^

The European suprise is :-O
The Asian suprise is O.O

In a test with 13 Europeans and 13 Asians they were shown different pictures of faces with the six basic emotions but with a neutral face. The Asians had problems to recognize fear and disgust whilst the Europeans had no problems to recognize all emotions correctly. During the experiment eye tracking was used. This way the scientists found out that the Asians were concentrating on the upper region of the faces, the eyes whereas the Europeans were scanning the whole face.

In a second analysis the scientists came to the result that if you only look at the eyes fear and suprise as well as disgust and anger are looking very similar. Therefore Asians are confusing fear or disgust with suprise or anger.

The whole experiment can be read on Current Biology.