A research conducted at the Universite de Montreal reveals that Asians and Caucasians view faces differently. Previous studies have shown that people collect information by mostly studying the eyes as well as the mouth of a face. But these studies always have been conducted on Caucasian test subjects.
Questioning the universality of facial recognition began after studies showed that Asians study faces in an overall fashion, while Caucasians break down faces into distinct parts. The researchers used a camera designed to track eye movements to study Caucasian and Asian participants. As part of the experiment, subjects were shown Caucasian and Asian faces and asked to report if they had seen the face before and to name the dominating trait. The study confirmed that Caucasians study the triangle of the eyes and mouth, while Asians focus on the nose.
Also, they excelled at recognising someone of their race, yet both had the same level of difficulty in identifying someone of another ethnic group. This says more about the analytical approach of Caucasians and the holistic approach of Asians.
Then in another experiment, where the subjects had to pinpoint an emotion - surprise, fear, disgust or joy, it was seen that Asians mostly focused on the eyes and not enough on the mouth, which meant some emotions were wrongly identified. They saw that Asians had particular problems with negative emotions. They confused fear and surprise as well as disgust and anger; mostly because they avoided looking at the mouth which provides a lot of information about these emotions.
It has been noted that cultural or biological causes can be behind humans not reading faces in a universal fashion.
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