[Buddha-l] ^_^ or (-: ?

[Dan Lusthaus]

> see http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8199951.stm
> is the population large enough to call for conclusions?
>
> erik

13 or each -- hardly. And what are East Asians doing in Glasgow aside from 
being tested?

The findings are clearly prejudiced:

"The paper states that the Eastern participants used a culturally specific 
decoding strategy that was inadequate to reliably distinguish the universal 
facial expressions of fear and disgust."

Despite the fact that their own study proves that their exemplars are NOT 
universal, they continue to call them "universal facial expressions," and 
then treat whoever doesn't conform as "inadequate."

If you look at the pictures, they are actually ambiguous -- the supposed 
"fear" in the upper left could very well be a type of surprise. What is 
surprise, after all? BOO! The face on the right, supposedly surprise, could 
be fear -- the sort of look one might initially give if a knife or gun were 
thrust at one. Fear and surprise are related.

They also don't differentiate where the various East Asians come from. 
Japanese, Koreans, Chinese, etc. each have different cultural "faces" they 
typically make -- the Japanese are most regimented and aligned in 
conformity. Koreans next; Chinese have more diversity. So if all or most of 
the "East Asians" are Japanese, one would have different results if one used 
different "universal" exemplars, and the Westerners might prove inadequate 
at differentiating them.

As for concluding that E Asians rely more on eyes and Westerners on the 
"whole face" (again, those dumb asians are just so inadequate!) based on 
emoticons... that has more to do with cartoon styles each has grown up with, 
as well as cultural sensibilities about how to define the emotions. We learn 
to draw a happy face or sad face by turning the mouth corners up or down. 
The Japanese emoticon shows the eyes crinkled from smiling, or crying. For 
the West, "sad" = frown, East sad = "crying". Both are metonymies.

There have been more serious and careful studies that have shown that 
Asians, blacks and whites recognize faces using different skills, and are 
most acute at recognizing faces of their own race, with much greater errors 
when trying to recognize faces of other races. The "they all look alike" 
syndrome. This experiment is not adding much to that research.

Dan