http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2...091510.php

"... Pay attention to the tone of his voice, not his face. That's what other Japanese people would do, anyway. A new study examines how Dutch and Japanese people assess others' emotions and finds that Dutch people pay attention to the facial expression more than Japanese people do."

Full: http://www.beatricedegelder.com/document...ensory.pdf

Interesting. I wonder how a Chinese person would judge this -- probably by facial expression.

...but did they use men or women for the experiment? /jk

Apparently autism can involve an inability to read people's emotions. I wonder if that's both facial expression and tone of voice. Also, sometimes meaning requires both tone and expression (irony or sarcasm might be signalled by the mismatch, for example). I wonder how culture might affect ability to interpret that stuff.

Thora Wrote:...but did they use men or women for the experiment? /jk...

Actually, that was my first reaction. No j/k. I'm no scholar, but in my experience (which is primarily in the States), it seems women and men read emotions, faces and voices in vastly different ways. I wonder if that holds true worldwide and if that was taken into consideration in the study.

(psst, Snowflake, it was jk reference to the recent 'misogyny' thread...apparently a touchy subject...so message me if you want to know the right answer.) ;p

Oh... oops... well, um ok, then... never mind .


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Curious, I went and skimmed through the rest of the aforementioned Misogyny thread (I hadn't really followed it after the first post or two). My, my. Ok, so again, never mind...

Snowflake Wrote:Oh... oops... well, um ok, then... never mind .


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Curious, I went and skimmed through the rest of the aforementioned Misogyny thread (I hadn't really followed it after the first post or two). My, my. Ok, so again, never mind...

lol

Well, I think this article feeds into the idea that it's culturally driven, i.e. learned elements that correlate with physiology.

Also I think anecdotally and scientifically "vastly different" is an overstatement and/or false.

I Wrote:Apparently autism can involve an inability to read people's emotions.

snowflake Wrote:it seems women and men read emotions, faces and voices in vastly different ways.

IceCream Wrote:[something about women being more empathic]

ergo, men are slightly autistic. (We should create policy based on this scientific finding) ;-)

I think his more famous cousin says that too.　[edit: haha ;p]

I just wanted to emphasize this, directly copy-pasted from the paper:
"Second, participants were instructed to look at the mouth area
in our experiment. Since there are cultural differences in the diagnostic facial
information when observers judge facial expressions (Jack et al., 2009), it is
worth investigating whether this tendency persists when the instructions
specify otherwise."
Japanese are known from earlier research on facial expressions to rely more on interpreting emotions from the area around the eyes (for which I have no source, I'm afraid. I did some searches on "Ekman japanese" on google scholar but I didn't find it) so it's possible that the Dutch had an advantage in reading the facial expressions and for that reason relied more on them. Just sayin'.

Surreal Wrote:I just wanted to emphasize this, directly copy-pasted from the paper:
"Second, participants were instructed to look at the mouth area
in our experiment. Since there are cultural differences in the diagnostic facial
information when observers judge facial expressions (Jack et al., 2009), it is
worth investigating whether this tendency persists when the instructions
specify otherwise."
Japanese are known from earlier research on facial expressions to rely more on interpreting emotions from the area around the eyes (for which I have no source, I'm afraid. I did some searches on "Ekman japanese" on google scholar but I didn't find it) so it's possible that the Dutch had an advantage in reading the facial expressions and for that reason relied more on them. Just sayin'.

The best papers are the ones that stress further exploration in this way. I say best but really I wouldn't trust one that didn't enumerate such things in their Discussion.