Culture and Emotional Expression

Culture leaves a visible mark even on something as automatic-seeming as gaze behaviour during a conversation. Research has found that Latin Americans and Southern Europeans tend to direct their gaze straight into the eyes of the person they are interacting with, whereas Asians — Indians and Pakistanis in particular — tend to prefer a peripheral gaze, looking somewhat away from the conversational partner rather than maintaining steady eye contact. This is a useful illustration of a broader point: while the core facial signals for basic emotions appear to be universal and inborn, the social conventions that surround emotional expression — how directly a feeling is displayed, how much eye contact is considered appropriate, how openly emotion is shown in public — are learned and vary meaningfully from one culture to another. A person raised in one cultural context can therefore genuinely misread the emotiona …