According to Melinda Wenner posting in LiveScience, a new study says Americans and Japanese read faces differently. In Japan, for example, people tend to look to the eyes for emotional cues, whereas Americans tend to look to the mouth.

Researcher Masaki Yuki, a behavioral scientist at Hokkaido University in Japan  said this could be because the Japanese, when in the presence of others, try to suppress their emotions more than Americans do.

In any case, the eyes are more difficult to control than the mouth, he said, so they probably provide better clues about a person’s emotional state even if he or she is trying to hide it.

Japanese people tend to shy away from overt displays of emotion, and rarely smile or frown with their mouths because the Japanese culture tends to emphasize conformity, humbleness and emotional suppression, traits that are thought to promote better relationships.

When Yuki entered graduate school and began communicating with American scholars over e-mail, he was often confused by their use of emoticons such as smiley faces and sad faces, or for example. “It took some time before I finally understood that they were faces.” In Japan, emoticons tend to emphasize the eyes, such as the happy face (^_^) and the sad face (;_;). “After seeing the difference between American and Japanese emoticons, it dawned on me that the faces looked exactly like typical American and Japanese smiles,” he said.

Research has shown that the expressive muscles around the eyes provide key clues about a person’s genuine emotions. The post goes on to describe the study that Yuki and team conducted on the basis of this smiley face brainstorm.

One result was that, since Japanese people tend to focus on the eyes, they could be better, overall, than Americans at perceiving people’s true feelings. Although this might be a very useful skill, it could also have potential drawbacks.

Yuki pointed out: “Would you really want to know if your friend’s, lover’s, or boss’s smile was not genuine? In some contexts, especially in the United States, maybe it is better not to know.”

Photo of coffee mugs: Uploaded to Flickr 01/08/06 by mu_0623, Some rights reserved.