Americans and Japanese Cultures Read Faces Differently

If you ever chatted with a Japanese person for the first time online one of the first things you'll probably notice is that their emoticons look kind of different. Your probably familiar with this the emoticon at the right in the picture it means your happy, indicated by the smile on the little emoticons face but for the same expression Japanese people enter something like the the emoticon to the left in the picture. Have you ever wondered why we write faces differently?

Of course culture plays a big factor in how we see things including the interpretation of facial expressions. Studies have shown when looking to see how a person is feeling Americans usually look at the mouth area while Japanese look at the eyes.

It not only explains why Japanese use these differnet kind of emoticons but it also explains why Anime and Manga Characters have such big eyes.

When you see a smile you think someone is happy but Japanese don't really rely on smiles. Japanese people are more inclined to hide their feelings. They try hard not to show emotion towards others and rarely smile or frown with their mouths. That's why they tend to look at the eyes to try to interpret how the person is feeling because it's hard to tell if anyone is happy by looking at their smile. Anyone can fake a smile. It's harder to control your eyes so they probably provide better clues about a person's emotional state even if he or she is trying to hide it.

I remember back in high school I made a new friend who was very quiet and she would gaze into my eyes for a long periods every once in a while. Creeped the hell out of me.

A test was conducted by Masaki Yuki, a behavioral scientist at Hokkaido University Japan to see how Japanese and American people would react looking at the same emoticons and pictures. The subjects were asked to rate an picture by how happy it looked. As the researchers predicted American subjects rated smiling emoticons with sad-looking eyes as happier than the Japanese subjects did.

Research has shown that the expressive muscles around the eyes provide key clues about a person's genuine emotions. Because Japanese people tend to focus on the eyes, they could be better, overall, than Americans at perceiving people's true feelings.

That maybe a good or bad thing depending on how much you want to know how a person truly feels. Even Yuki mentions that it's better not to know some things.