japan timesの英文和訳お願いします。
Does this strike a chord with any Westerners living in Japan? Or Japanese when interacting with Westerners?
Certainly, I can understand it. There are many occasions when expressions and emotions may be misunderstood, and this research might provide part of an explanation as to why that happens so frequently.
Jack and colleagues investigated cultural differences in the recognition of facial expressions by recording the eye movements of 13 Western Caucasian and 13 East Asian people while they observed pictures of expressive faces. They then put them into categories: happy, sad, surprised, fearful, disgusted, angry, or neutral.
The faces were standardized according to something called the Facial Action Coding System (FACS). This sets each expression as displaying a specific combination of facial muscles typically associated with each feeling of emotion. The researchers then compared how accurately participants read those facial expressions using their particular eye-movement strategies.
It turned out that Easterners focused much greater attention on the eyes, and made significantly more errors than Westerners did. In other words, while Westerners use the whole face to convey emotion, Easterners use the eyes more and the mouth less.
And interestingly, this cultural difference extends to cyberspace.
Emoticons — text marks used to convey facial expressions of the writer’s mood — are different in Japan and the West.
In the West, the commonest emoticons for “happy” and “sad” use the mouth to convey the emotion, so we have :) and :(
In Japan, however, the eyes are used to convey the emotions, so ^.^ is commonly used for happy and ;-; for sad.
“Emoticons are used to convey different emotions in cyberspace as they are the iconic representation of facial expressions,” Jack said. “Interestingly, there are clear cultural differences in the formations of these icons.”
In summary, the researchers say, there are real perceptual differences between Western Caucasian and East Asian people. However, I doubt whether that applies to Caucasians who have grown up in Japan, or Japanese who have grown up in America, for example. It’s all about the culture you grow up in — your so-called nurture rather than nature.
But, without overgeneralizing, it does help us understand how attempts to communicate emotions sometimes get lost in translation.
