Benj@N69

The faces of Asian people often look strangely rigid to Westerners. A recent study found out why: Asians focus only on the eyes to decipher somebody’s feelings from their face, while Westerners also take the mouth region into account.

This is also reflected by how the emoticons look at different places: Western emoticons rely on the mouth to express the mood as in :-) and :-(, while Asian emoticons for the same look for example like ^.^ and ;_;

Check out the full article (in case you’d like to pay for it): Jack et al., “Cultural Confusions Show that Facial Expressions Are Not Universal”, in Current Biology