Facial Expressions Across Cultures

During my time in China in the summer of 2006, one thing that continually fascinated me was the way differences in Chinese and American culture manifested themselves in the way the two peoples looked and acted. Essentially, how can you tell an American-Chinese from a local Chinese?

There are of course the very obvious factors like clothing, hair, and the fact that American-Chinese spoke perfect American and usually pretty crummy Chinese. But one thing that I noticed was the difference in the facial expressions of Americans and Chinese. While sitting in a dining hall on the campus of China’s national pride, Peking University (soon to be changed to Beijing University), I made a comment to one of my classmates that native Chinese tend to have more “blank” expressions when they’re not doing anything. By that I meant the Chinese locals around us, engaging in one of the least brain-intensive tasks humans know of, chewing and swallowing, had seemingly expressionless faces and looked as if they had nothing going through their minds. On the other hand, an American, to me, doing the exact same thing, not talking to anyone, not doing anything particularly brain-intensive, has an expression that is not “blank” but contemplative and thoughtful, sort of. It just seems as if they’re thinking about something whether it’s how much they’re going to lose in taxes that year, what the weather will be like the next day, how amazing it is that so much flavor can be packed into seven layers of meat and cheese whereas native Chinese look as if they aren’t even contemplating such things.

Here’s my theory about why this seems the way it is. Native Chinese grow up in a very different culture than Americans and throughout their lives, are exposed to facial expressions distinctive to their culture. Even though there are such universal expressions such as a smile or a laugh or a tear, more subtle expressions vary in accordance with each culture. Through all this differing exposure, Americans and native Chinese end up making slightly different facial expressions when they’re mad, happy, scared, worried, etc.

The catch is it’s tough to understand and interpret these more subtle expressions across cultures. Being American-born and American-raised, I’ve grown up seeing millions of American angry expressions and American happy expressions, but I’ve had little exposure to Chinese expressions. As a result, I’m not as sensitive to the tiny differences between Chinese expressions as I am to tiny differences between American expressions. While the difference between an American scowl and an American expression of worry may be more than obvious to me, the difference between a Chinese scowl and a Chinese expression of worry has a slightly different set of differences that I can’t detect having been raised in an American culture.

Going back to the whole “blank” expressions deal, what I like to call the “default” facial expression, that is what we show when we’re not really doing anything brain-intensive, is different for Chinese and Americans. And so for me, I can’t read quite as well the expressions of Chinese in their default expression, so it looks as if it’s not really anything, blank. With Americans, however, even in their default expressions I can detect hints of emotion and thought manifesting themselves very subtly.

And so when I made the “blank” comment, I didn’t mean to mean. I just wanted to point out how differences in the way we’ve been trained to perceive subtleties in facial expressions can cause difficulties in interpreting or even outright misinterpretations of the facial expressions of other cultures.