Reading faces: facial expressions, culture and the "inscrutable" - and smileys :) ^.^

Your ability to recognise other people's facial expressions accurately can depend on your culture (hence, in my view anyway, Western stereotypes about "inscrutable" Orientals). This is even reflected in differences in emoticons, see below.

Because East Asians mainly look at eyes rather than mouth or the whole face, they find it harder to differentiate between emotions where the eyes look the same - fear vs. surprise, disgust vs. anger. Cultural Confusions Show that Facial Expressions Are Not Universal, Rachael E. Jack,Caroline Blais, Christoph Scheepers, Philippe G. Schyns and Roberto Caldara, 2009 - summary, press release. This research was also picked up e.g. in a New Scientist article Human facial expressions aren't universal.

"The cultural specificity in eye movements that they show is probably a reflection of cultural specificity in facial expressions, Jack said. Their data suggest that while Westerners use the whole face to convey emotion, Easterners use the eyes more and mouth less."

In other words, in Eastern societies it's less acceptable to show emotion.

I suspect that, conversely, Westerners find it harder to recognise emotions in Easterners, which are conveyed mainly through the eyes, and therefore (wrongly) think that Easterners are emotionless. I believe all this ties in with cultural stereotypes about "inscrutable" Orientals.

Differences between Eastern and Western smileys

Even more interestingly, their survey of Eastern versus Western emoticons (smileys or smilies) supported the eyes vs mouth differentiation:

"..there are clear cultural differences in the formations of these icons… Western emoticons primarily use the mouth to convey emotional states, e.g. : ) for happy and : ( for sad, she noted, whereas Eastern emoticons use the eyes, e.g. ^.^ for happy and ;_; for sad."

"In sum," the researchers wrote, "our data demonstrate genuine perceptual differences between Western Caucasian and East Asian observers and show that FACS-coded facial expressions are not universal signals of human emotion."