The facial expressions

If we talk about facial expressions, usually you can hear that they are almost universal, that if you go to another country you will smile and the people who live there will know that the expression you make was because you are happy or you like something. But if you hear these facts, in this year, maybe you have heard it from a person who is not actualized in the information. 

Why do I say this? Because now, there is evidence about the facial expressions, like the smile that is the product of happiness, are not universal. We have believed that our expressions and the emotions that give birth that expression where caused by a biological fact, but this is also against of the new approach that have been developed in the actuality.

This new approach argues that there is not such a thing like the universal expressions and that these expressions are determined by the social and cultural context. The proofs of this are in the Trobriand Islands; here the habitants have been tested to know if their perception of the most common facial expressions (joy, sadness, anger, fear and disgust) matches with the perception of other people (the majority).

The experiment to proof this is about asking a group of kids and teens to tell the emotion that one of the photographs seems to be like (one per each common emotion and expression: joy, sadness, anger, fear and disgust; and a face without expression). And the results show that the 58% of the people matches the smile with joy, the 46% matches “correctly” (like the way the rest of the world will do it) sadness, 31% fear, 25% disgust and 7% anger. So the results show discordance between the matches of these Islands with the results of the rest of the world, concluding that the culture is the thing that make us thing and recognize thing as we do in this moment. 

Source: S/n, (2016), Estudio demuestra que el significado de la sonrisa no es universal, Extracted from: http://www.carasycaretas.

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