A. focus B. examining C. expressive D. communication E. significantly
AB. neglect AC. distinguishing AD. reliably AE. recognition BC. considerate
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People from East Asia tend to have more difficulty than those from Europe in
42 facial expressions – and a new report published online in Current Biology explains why.
Rachael Jack, University of Glasgow researcher, said that rather than scanning evenly (均匀地) across a face as Westerners do, Easterners
43 their attention on the eyes.
“We show that Easterners and Westerners look at different face features to read facial expressions,” Jack said. “Westerners look at the eyes and the mouth in equal measure, whereas Easterners favor the eyes and
44 the mouth.”
According to Jack and her colleagues, the discovery shows that human
45 of emotion is more complex than previously believed. As a result, facial expressions that had been considered universally recognizable cannot be used to
46 convey emotion in a cross-cultural situation.
The researchers studied cultural differences in the
47 of facial expressions by recording the eye movements of 13 Western people and 13 East Asian people while they observed pictures of
48 faces and put them into categories: happy, sad, surprised, fearful, disgusted, angry, or neutral (中立的). They compared how accurately participants read those facial expressions using their particular eye movement strategies.
It turned out that Easterners focused much greater attention on the eyes and made
49 more errors than did Westerners. “The cultural difference in eye movements that they show is probably a reflection of cultural difference in facial expressions,” Jack said. “Our data suggest that whereas Westerners use the whole face to convey emotion, Easterners use the eyes more and mouth less.”
In short, the data show that facial expressions are not universal signals of human emotion. From here on,
50 how cultural factors have differed in these basic social skills will help our understanding of human emotion. Otherwise, when it comes to communicating emotions across cultures, Easterners and Westerners will find themselves lost in translation.