Cross-cultural Emotions: Are there universal face expressions?

This article discusses the universality of facial expressions of emotions among cross cultures. It also highlights the importance of facial emotion recognition in social interactions. The article explains the concept of emotions and facial expressions, cross-cultural differences, and the falsity of the universality of facial expressions of emotions. The article concludes that there is minimal universality in facial expressions among cross cultures.

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Topic: Cross-cultural Emotions: Are there universal face expressions?
In this article it is discussed, there are ranges of ways human as social being socially
interact with each other. These forms of social interaction allow humans to work, study, and
socialize with friends and family along with much other type of interactions that occur on daily
lives. Facial expression, specifically facial emotion recognition is one such significant aspect to
successful social interactions. It is the ability to infer emotional states from another person’s face
that is used to refer the facial recognition (Burr, 2018). In support, this article states, the
significance of face emotion recognition to social cognition can be inferred more generally from
the finding that people with some neurodevelopment disorders or psychiatric disorders. It is for
the fact that they are faced with difficulty when the facial expression is considered. However,
there is a high degree of agreement among the observers of facial expression to the emotion
being expressed. Therefore, faces are considered as a rich source of information for the
psychologists for learning personality and emotions (Davis, 2018).
Emotions and facial expression
The article states the ability to understand facial expressions is a crucial part of non-
verbal communication. While listening to a person, it becomes important to see the facial
expression for it is hard to understand the entire feeling of emotion of the person. in several
cases, words do not match emotions. Humans perceive various things while understanding
things other person says. Often it is the signals and the gestures that human body uses while
expressing themselves. Through the help of human expressions one tries to understand the
emotion present in someone’s talking. In the past two decades the modern psychologists have
researched and produced strong evidences that confirm Darwin’s century-old hypothesis of the

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universality and innateness of certain facial expression of emotions. In the field of psychology,
personality, social and psychophysiology the research on expressive behavior has become widely
established. Also, there are signs that shows increased interesting emotions in clinical
psychology and the neuroscience. Regardless the success of the work on emotions expression
and the upward trend in emotions, commonly the main issue of the relation between the emotion
experience and emotion expression is still controversial (Du, Tao and Martinez, 2014).
Cross cultural differences
To understand if there is no universality in facial expression among the cross cultures one
has to understand the cross cultural differences. In this article, the author has discussed each
person is different from the other for various social, psychological and environmental factors.
Therefore communication between two people becomes highly important. Communication is the
process through which two individual exchange ideas, facts and figures from one person to
another. Cross cultural implies with people of different ethnic, cultural or social background. It is
a way of communicating with the people belonging from different back rounds. Different forms
of socialization takes place differently and raises human different which is the reason every
person s different from one another (Wolf, 2015). Often people grew up in different countries
have different ways to perceiving the life events. This is where the main differences arises which
is to communicate flawless and fluently with people from other cultural background. People in
different countries have different culture and different ways of perceiving the world. They
interpret events in different ways. They have different habits, values and ways of relating to one
another. Therefore, when people from different culture come across they face difficulty in their
communication and the interactions among them.

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Facial expression of emotions is not culturally universal:
The article discusses the question in regard to universal facial expressions of emotions
has remained ancient. The reason this question has been popular is due to three main reasons.
Firstly, it is the foundation of three discoveries regarding face. The voluntarily performed facial
actions are capable of generating emotions-specific physiology, therefore there are chances that
facial expression can be universal. Smile is identified as the sign of enjoyment in every culture
which signifies that there are possibilities for universal facial expression. Also, the development
of new methods for measuring visible facial action have shown that there are ways one can
identify same facial expression among different cultures. Secondly, reason considers the
universality questions that misunderstanding and controversies is in continuous process in regard
to nature of the evidence and the things it means. Thirdly, the new findings on cultural
differences in facial expression are understood on the same aspects (Thomas and Peterson,
2017).
In this article, Jack, Garrod and Schyns states the concept that is understood universally is
the six emotions: happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust and surprise. Human being uses the
same set of facial gestures and movements in order to express these emotions. It is very common
for humans to recognize human emotions from their face. It was until the new researches on
these aspects that reveal it is not true. For nearly two decades researches have been taken
forward which tracked down these researches and established it as only a misconception. Many
researches have been conducted in order to investigate this concept and to find out the reality. It
has been found that emotions are not universally perceived and any prediction based on that is a
mistake. The falsity can be understood as a fact when the research in the year 1970 was carried
out by Paul Ekman traveled to Papua New Guinea to experiment. The experiment was based on

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the weather emotions were universally expressed and experienced the same way. In order to test
his hypothesis, he looked a whether people were able to recognize the same emotions in facial
expressions around the globe. It was more to analyze if a scowling face is classified by as angry
regardless of the observers’ cultural background (Jack, Garrod and Schyns, 2014).
In the article, an experiment was conducted on people in regard to the emotions. The
experiment involved people from the rural areas who are slightly familiar with the western
culture. They were presented with photographs depicting caricatured expressions. They asked the
people to identify the emotions and match their faces with one of the six emotions. Regardless of
the place they came from, the subjects saw the same emotions reflected in the same photographs.
However the from another research, context seemed to play enormous rile in the way emotions
are perceived. As the researcher was curious of the role in the way one perceives each other’s
expression. Therefore, the researcher asked the subjects to match image to finite categories and
rich stories involving emotional events rather than sorting them freely. When the both facial
expression and vocalization that hypothesize that if emotional truly is universally recognizable,
the middle expression should be a matter a concern. When 36 faces photos of faces were given
and asked them to freely sort the photos into piles on the basis of similar facial expressions. Six
piles labeled with emotion words were found with a universal solutions. However this was not
found to be the ultimate truth. In fact there are more than the six photos that were explained with
the help of words. The same photos would end up in various piles that were labeled as ‘happy’,
‘laughing’ or Kumisa which is a tribal word used mostly for describing wonder (Gendronet al.,
2014).
In this article it is found that for more than centuries researchers have wondered that
every human experience and express their emotions in the same way. This concept with several

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researches have been challenged and seen as a false statement. The experiments have
successfully shown that it is not easy t say that emotions so not elicit natural psychological
reactions however they suggests that the reactions and interpretations can vary from culture to
culture. When the face is gasped, the expressions could be natural response to urgent or
distressing situation. It is the western culture that has tied that expression to feeling fear. It may
be that the people associated with that specific expression with instilling it (Wolf, 2015).
In this article, on the basis of the information gathered done, it can be concluded that
there is no universality in facial expression among the cross cultures. However there is minimal
universality. In it, the finite number of ways that facial muscles can move creates a basis
template of expressions which are filtered by cultures and gain a specific meaning. If the case is
any similar to it, it can be stated that cultural diversity in facial expression will tend to be
challenging for the technologies that are emerging in the contemporary era such as the
technologies that aspire to decode and react to human emotions (Lewinski, den Uyl and Butler,
2014).

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References:
Burr, V. (2018). Social constructionism (pp. 1-16). Springer Singapore.
Davis, M. H. (2018). Empathy: A social psychological approach. Routledge.
Du, S., Tao, Y., & Martinez, A. M. (2014). Compound facial expressions of
emotion. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(15), E1454-E1462.
Gendron, M., Roberson, D., van der Vyver, J. M., & Barrett, L. F. (2014). Perceptions of
emotion from facial expressions are not culturally universal: evidence from a remote
culture. Emotion, 14(2), 251.
Jack, R. E., Garrod, O. G., & Schyns, P. G. (2014). Dynamic facial expressions of emotion
transmit an evolving hierarchy of signals over time. Current biology, 24(2), 187-192.
Lewinski, P., den Uyl, T. M., & Butler, C. (2014). Automated facial coding: Validation of basic
emotions and FACS AUs in FaceReader. Journal of Neuroscience, Psychology, and
Economics, 7(4), 227.
Thomas, D. C., & Peterson, M. F. (2017). Cross-cultural management: Essential concepts. Sage
Publications.
Wolf, K. (2015). Measuring facial expression of emotion. Dialogues in clinical
neuroscience, 17(4), 457.