“We show that Easterners and Westerners look at different face features to read facial expressions,” said Rachael Jack, from the team at Glasgow University who carried out the research.

“Westerners look at the eyes and the mouth in equal measure, whereas Easterners favor the eyes and neglect the mouth. This means that Easterners have difficulty distinguishing facial expressions that look similar around the eye region.”

In the study, western Caucasian and east Asian volunteers were asked to look at photographs of faces with seven basic emotional expressions: happy, sad, angry, disgust, fear, surprise and neutral.

The Asian participants had difficulty recognizing facial expressions of fear and disgust, mistakenly interpreting them as surprise and anger instead, said the research study, published in the journal Current Biology on Thursday.

“Unlike the Western participants who took clues from the whole face… the East Asian participants focused mainly on the eyes, where the information is often just too similar to discriminate some expressions,” said the study.

Jack added: “Interestingly, although the eye region is ambiguous, subjects tended to bias their judgments toward less socially-threatening emotions - surprise rather than fear, for example.

Source: AFP