People from
East Asia tend to have more difficulty than those from Europe in distinguishing
facial expressions — and a new report published online in Current Biology explains
why.
Rachael Jack, University of Glasgow researcher, said that rather than scanning
evenly(均匀的)
across a face as Westerners do, Easterners fix their attention on the eyes.
"We show that Easterners and Westerners look at different face features to
read facial expressions," Jack said. "Westerners look at the eyes and
the mouth in equal measure, whereas Easterners favor the eyes and neglect (忽略) the mouth."
According to Jack and her colleagues, the discovery shows that human
communication of emotion is more complex than previously believed. As a result,
facial expressions that had been considered universally recognizable cannot be
used to reliably convey emotion in cross-cultural situations.
The researchers studied cultural differences in the recognition of facial
expressions by recording the eye movements of 13 Western Caucasian and 13 East
Asian people while they observed pictures of. expressive faces and put them
into categories: happy, sad, surprised, fearful, disgusted, angry, or neutral.
They compared how accurately participants read those facial expressions using
their particular eye movement strategies.
It turned out that Easterners focused much greater attention on the eyes and
made significantly more errors than did Westerners. "The cultural
difference in eye movements that they show is probably a reflection of
cultural difference in facial expressions," Jack said. "Our data
suggest that whereas Westerners use the whole face to convey emotion, Easterners
use the eyes more and mouth less."
In short, the data show that facial expressions are not universal
signals of human emotion. From here on, examining how cultural factors have
diversified these basic social skills will help our understanding of human
emotion. Otherwise, when it comes to communicating emotions across cultures,
Easterners and Westerners will find themselves lost in translation.
1.The
discovery shows that Westerners .
A. pay equal attention to the eyes and the mouth
B. consider facial expressions universally reliable
C. observe the eyes and the mouth in different ways
D. have more difficulty in recognizing facial expressions
2.What
were the people asked to do in the study?
A. To make a face at each other.
B. To get their faces impressive.
C. To classify some face pictures.
D. To observe the researchers' faces.
3.What
does the underlined word "they" in Paragraph 6 refer to?
A. The participants in the study.
B. The researchers of the study.
C. The errors made during the study.
D. The data collected from the study.
4.In comparison
with Westerners, Easterners are likely to .
A. do translation more successfully
B. study the mouth more frequently
C. examine the eyes more attentively
D. read facial expressions more correctly
5.What
can be the best title for the passage?
A. The Eye as the Window to the Soul
B. Cultural Differences in Reading Emotions
C. Effective Methods to Develop Social
Skills
D. How to Increase Cross-cultural
Understanding