The eyes-and not the mouth-are the true windows to the soul, at least among East Asians, new research in the journal Current Biology suggests.

Using tiny cameras to track the eye movements of 13 Europeans and 13 Chinese or Japanese university students as they viewed faces representing seven different emotional states, Dr. Rachael E. Jack of the University of Glasgow in Scotland and her colleagues found that while the Europeans looked at both the eyes and mouth, Asians focused on the eyes almost exclusively.

Jack and her colleagues conducted the study to better understand why Asians might have a harder time recognizing certain “negative” facial expressions than Westerners do, as some studies have suggested. The conventional wisdom, they explain, has been that facial expressions are a universal language, with a scary face and a happy face meaning the same thing to everyone no matter their cultural background.

Jack and her team recruited 12 Chinese students and 1 Japanese student to participate in the study. All had just arrived at the University of Glasgow to study, having been in the country for about a week, on average, and none had visited a Western country before.

The pictures Jack and her team used included both Asian and Western faces, and included “happy,” “surprised,” “fearful,” “disgusted,” “angry,” “sad,” and “neutral” expressions.

Eye tracking revealed that the Asian individuals spent most of their time looking at eyes, while Westerners divided their attention between the eyes and mouth. Asian study participants made more mistakes than Westerners in categorizing the emotions expressed, in particular mixing up fear and surprise, as well as anger and disgust.

This is probably because, Jack told Reuters Health in an interview, the eyes of an angry or disgusted person look pretty similar, while the same is true for a surprised or fearful person.

She and her colleagues are now investigating what these emotions look like to East Asian people, as opposed to Westerners.

“Our results are quite nicely reflected by emoticons that are used to convey emotions in cyberspace,” Jack said. For example, she noted, when a Westerner would use :) to represent a happy face, an Easterner might type this instead: ^.^

SOURCE: Current Biology, online August 13, 2009.

By Anne Harding
NEW YORK (Reuters Health)