Communication
between people is a complicated process. What we say may just be a ritualistic
comment. We use body language and facial expression to confirm or deny the
sentiments expressed verbally.
Facial
expressions have been grouped into just six different expressions. These are
Happy, Sad, Fear, Anger, Disgust and Surprise. The concept of this universality
of facial expression stems from the idea that we humans all have the same set
of facial muscles that we exercise when put on one expression or another.
Jack
et al have been worrying about this
universality of facial expression and decided to put it to the test like good
psychologists and they have published their result in the early edition of PNAS
this week.
Their
experimental program used 30 people. 15 were Western Caucasian and 15 were
Easte Asian. They all had to watch almost 5,000 computer animations of faces
going through a range of expressions and classify them using the six
categories. In addition they had to rate the emotional intensity. The
animations showed both Western Caucasian faces and East Asian ones.
The
results confirmed the universality of the six expressions, but only for the
Western Caucasians. Things were quite a bit different for the East Asian faces.
The expressions weren’t culturally universal and also the emotional intensities
were not clear-cut.
Clearly
we need to be careful about universality conclusions based on theory without a
universal study to confirm. Culture can easily trump such simplifying
assumptions.
