How do facial expressions influence emotion perception in Japanese culture

Facial expressions influence emotion perception in Japanese culture in culturally specific ways, often emphasizing subtleties such as the eyes more than the mouth. Japanese people tend to focus primarily on the eyes when interpreting emotions, which contrasts with Westerners who attend to both eyes and mouth. This cultural difference affects how emotions are recognized and perceived, particularly in social contexts where background figures’ emotions and situational cues are also incorporated.

Key points include:

• Japanese individuals rely more on the eyes as cues for emotions, especially when parts of the face like the mouth are obscured (e.g., by masks), which can reduce emotion recognition accuracy overall. ^{1, 2}
• There is higher sensitivity to the social context in emotion perception; Japanese people consider the expressions of surrounding people in their emotion judgments, reflecting interdependent self-construal and collectivistic culture. ^{3, 4}
• Recognition of specific emotions such as fear can be less accurate among Japanese individuals, reflecting cultural display rules and cognitive mechanisms in emotion perception. ^{5, 6}
• Cultural differences shape mental representations of emotion intensity and prototypes, with Japanese culture influencing subtle differentiations in facial expression interpretation compared to Western cultures. ^{6, 7}
• Recent studies also suggest that masks affect emotion perception in Japan more in children than adults, but transparent masks can mitigate these effects. ⁸

Overall, Japanese culture’s influence on facial expression perception is marked by a focus on eye cues, integration of social context, and culturally shaped cognitive styles that affect both the recognition and interpretation of emotions on faces. ^{2, 1, 3}

If more detailed or specific insights are needed, further targeted exploration of these studies can be done.

References

• Influence of the Cultural Group of the Target and Wearing a Mask on Eye Gazing During Facial Expression Perception: Examination of Japanese Population.

• Social sensitivity predicts accurate emotion inference from facial expressions in a face mask: a study in Japan

• Culture and emotion perception: comparing Canadian and Japanese children’s and parents’ context sensitivity

• Inferring Emotion from Facial Expression in Social Contexts. A Role of Self-Construal?

• Characteristics of healthy Japanese young adults with respect to recognition of facial expressions: a preliminary study

• Emotion perception across cultures: the role of cognitive mechanisms

• Emotion perception across cultures: the role of cognitive mechanisms

• Effects of wearing an opaque or transparent face mask on the perception of facial expressions: A comparative study between Japanese school-aged children and adults

• American-Japanese Cultural Differences in the Recognition of Universal Facial Expressions

• Judging Facial Emotion Expressions in Context: The Influence of Culture and Self-Construal Orientation

• Are you looking at me? The influence of facial orientation and cultural focus salience on the perception of emotion expressions

• Culture influences audiovisual emotion perception in early sensory areas

• Does background color influence the perception of facial expression? Adjustment to neutral expression by Caucasian and Japanese participants.

• The Recognition of Cross-Cultural Emotional Faces Is Affected by Intensity and Ethnicity in a Japanese Sample

• Facial Expressions of Basic Emotions in Japanese Laypeople

• The Recognition of Cross-Cultural Emotional Faces Is Affected by Intensity and Ethnicity in a Japanese Sample

• How emotion is experienced and expressed in multiple cultures: a large-scale experiment across North America, Europe, and Japan

• How emotion is experienced and expressed in multiple cultures: a large-scale experiment across North America, Europe, and Japan

• Facial Expressions of Basic Emotions in Japanese Laypeople

• Cultural facial expressions dynamically convey emotion category and intensity information

• Deep learning reveals what facial expressions mean to people in different cultures

• Evidence and a computational explanation of cultural differences in facial expression recognition.

• Cultural Differences in Emoticon Perception: Japanese See the Eyes and Dutch the Mouth of Emoticons

• Testing, explaining, and exploring models of facial expressions of emotions

• “There Is No (Where a) Face Like Home”: Recognition and Appraisal Responses to Masked Facial Dialects of Emotion in Four Different National Cultures