Cultural Confusions Show that Facial Expressions Are Not Universal

Current Biology

Volumn 19, Issue 18, 2009, Pages 1543-1548

  Jack, Rachael E ^a   Blais, Caroline ^b   Scheepers, Christoph ^a   Schyns, Philippe G ^a   Caldara, Roberto ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW   (United Kingdom)

^b UNIVERSITÉ DE MONTRÉAL   (Canada)

Author keywords

SYSNEURO

Indexed keywords

ADULT; ARTICLE; CONFUSION; CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY; CULTURAL FACTOR; EMOTION; ETHNOLOGY; EYE MOVEMENT; FACIAL EXPRESSION; FAR EAST; FEMALE; HUMAN; HUMAN RELATION; MALE; PHOTOSTIMULATION; RECOGNITION;

ADULT; CONFUSION; CROSS-CULTURAL COMPARISON; CULTURAL CHARACTERISTICS; CULTURE; EMOTIONS; EYE MOVEMENTS; FACIAL EXPRESSION; FAR EAST; FEMALE; HUMANS; INTERPERSONAL RELATIONS; MALE; PHOTIC STIMULATION; RECOGNITION (PSYCHOLOGY); WESTERN WORLD;

EID: 70349289081     PISSN: 09609822     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2009.07.051     Document Type: Article

References (37)

1. Darwin C. The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), John Murray, London
2. Ekman P. Strong evidence for universals in facial expressions: A reply to Russell's mistaken critique. Psychol. Bull. 115 (1994) 268-287
3. Izard C.E. Innate and universal facial expressions: Evidence from developmental and cross-cultural research. Psychol. Bull. 115 (1994) 288-299
4. Elfenbein H.A., and Ambady N. On the universality and cultural specificity of emotion recognition: A meta-analysis. Psychol. Bull. 128 (2002) 203-235
5. Russell J.A. Is there universal recognition of emotion from facial expression? A review of cross-cultural studies. Psychol. Bull. 115 (1994) 102-141
6. Mesquita B., and Frijda N.H. Cultural variations in emotions: A review. Psychol. Bull. 112 (1992) 179-204
7. Matsumoto D., and Ekman P. Japanese and Caucasian Facial Expressions of Emotion (JACFEE) [slides] (1988), Intercultural and Emotion Research Laboratory, Department of Psychology, San Francisco State University, San Francisco
8. Ekman P., and Friesen W.V. Facial Action Coding System: A Technique for the Measurement of Facial Movement (1978), Consulting Psychologists Press, Palo Alto, CA
9. Ekman P., Friesen W.V., O'Sullivan M., Chan A., Diacoyanni-Tarlatzis I., Heider K., Krause R., LeCompte W.A., Pitcairn T., Ricci-Bitti P.E., et al. Universals and cultural differences in the judgments of facial expressions of emotion. J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 53 (1987) 712-717
10. Matsumoto D. American-Japanese cultural differences in the recognition of universal facial expressions. J. Cross Cult. Psychol. 23 (1992) 72-84
11. Matsumoto D., and Ekman P. American-Japanese cultural differences in intensity ratings of facial expressions of emotion. Motiv. Emot. 13 (1989) 143-157
12. Jorma R. Stochastic Complexity in Statistical Inquiry Theory (1989), World Scientific Publishing Co., River Edge, NJ
13. Zhao W., Serpedin E., and Dougherty E.R. Inferring gene regulatory networks from time series data using the minimum description length principle. Bioinformatics 22 (2006) 2129-2135
14. Smith M.L., Cottrell G.W., Gosselin F., and Schyns P.G. Transmitting and decoding facial expressions. Psychol. Sci. 16 (2005) 184-189
15. Schyns P.G. Diagnostic recognition: Task constraints, object information, and their interactions. Cognition 67 (1998) 147-179
16. Russell J.A. Culture and the categorization of emotions. Psychol. Bull. 110 (1991) 426-450
17. Wierzbicka A. Defining emotion concepts. Cogn. Sci. 16 (1992) 539-581
18. Buck R. The Communication of Emotion (1984), Guildford Press, New York
19. Yuki M., Maddux W.W., and Masuda T. Are the windows to the soul the same in the East and West? Cultural differences in using the eyes and mouth as cues to recognize emotions in Japan and the United States. J. Exp. Soc. Psychol. 43 (2007) 303-311
20. Pollack, A. (1996). Happy in the East (--) or smiling :-) in the West. New York Times, August 12, 1996. http://www.nytimes.com/1996/08/12/business/happy-in-the-east-or-smiling-in-the-west.html.
21. Blais C., Jack R.E., Scheepers C., Fiset D., and Caldara R. Culture shapes how we look at faces. PLoS ONE 3 (2008) e3022
22. Gosselin F., and Schyns P.G. Bubbles: A technique to reveal the use of information in recognition tasks. Vision Res. 41 (2001) 2261-2271
23. Schyns P.G., and Oliva A. Dr. Angry and Mr. Smile: When categorization flexibly modifies the perception of faces in rapid visual presentations. Cognition 69 (1999) 243-265
24. Smith, F., and Schyns, P. Smile through your fear and sadness: Transmitting and identifying facial expression signals over a range of viewing distances. Psychol. Sci., in press.
25. Schyns P.G., Petro L.S., and Smith M.L. Dynamics of visual information integration in the brain for categorizing facial expressions. Curr. Biol. 17 (2007) 1580-1585
26. Malcolm G.L., Lanyon L.J., Fugard A.J.B., and Barton J.J.S. Scan patterns during the processing of facial expression versus identity: An exploration of task-driven and stimulus-driven effects. J. Vis. 8 (2008) 1-9
27. Caldara R., Schyns P., Mayer E., Smith M.L., Gosselin F., and Rossion B. Does prosopagnosia take the eyes out of face representations? Evidence for a defect in representing diagnostic facial information following brain damage. J. Cogn. Neurosci. 17 (2005) 1652-1666
28. Han S., and Northoff G. Culture-sensitive neural substrates of human cognition: A transcultural neuroimaging approach. Nat. Rev. Neurosci. 9 (2008) 646-654
29. O'Toole A.J., Deffenbacher K.A., Valentin D., and Abdi H. Structural aspects of face recognition and the other-race effect. Mem. Cognit. 22 (1994) 208-224
30. O'Toole A.J., Peterson J., and Deffenbacher K.A. An 'other-race effect' for categorizing faces by sex. Perception 25 (1996) 669-676
31. Tiddeman B., Burt M., and Perrett D. Prototyping and transforming facial textures for perception research. IEEE Comput. Graph. Appl. 21 (2001) 42-50
32. Hall E. The Hidden Dimension (1966), Doubleday, Garden City, NY
33. Ibrahimagić-Šeper L., Čelebić A., Petričević N., and Selimović E. Anthropometric differences between males and females in face dimensions and dimensions of central maxillary incisors. Med. Glas. 3 (2006) 58-62
34. Miles W.R. Ocular dominance in human adults. J. Gen. Psychol. 3 (1930) 412-430
35. Chauvin A., Worsley K.J., Schyns P.G., Arguin M., and Gosselin F. Accurate statistical tests for smooth classification images. J. Vis. 5 (2005) 659-667
36. MacQueen, J. (1967). Some methods for classification and analysis of multivariate observations. In Proceedings of the Fifth Berkeley Symposium on Mathematical Statistics and Probability, Volume 1 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press), pp. 281-297.
37. Simoncelli, E.P., and Freeman, W.T. (1995). The steerable pyramid: A flexible architecture for multi-scale derivative computation. In Proceedings of the 1995 International Conference on Image Processing, Volume 3 (Washington, DC: IEEE Computer Society), pp. 444-447.