Comparison Of Emotions Between American And Japanese Students

Humans are believed to experience 6 base emotions; Anger, Disgust, Fear, Happiness, Sadness and Surprise. We all express these emotions in several ways, including body language ang language, with the most prevalent, possibly being facial expression. However, there is discussion on whether humans can universally recognise these emotions across the world.

One study was carried out to determine whether American and Japanese students could perceive each other’s emotions through facial expressions. The subjects were 16 Japanese students that were only in America for a 3-week English course and 14 American students. There were a range of ages from 18-41 and a mixture of males and females in both groups. These subjects were exposed to a simulator which mimicked facial expressions given by both an American male and a Japanese male. The simulator had 24 different facial expressions

They were given a “happy” button and “angry” button and told to press which emotion they were presented with. When exposed to the “happy” expression from both the American and Japanese face, the Japanese subjects recognized the expression as “happy” at similar ranges, and also for both faces, reacted less to brow movement than to mouth movement. The American reactions were remarkably similar. Both groups reacted slightly faster to their own ethnicity, however, the same results occurred when exposed to different ages and races. This shows that humans may notice changes in emotional expressions when closer to the subject, however, do also recognise expressions presented by those out with their own age, race, gender and culture. Furthermore, this gives evidence that humans use similar facial expressions to express emotions across cultures and race, making it possible to recognise when a person of another race or culture expresses emotion. (Massaro & Ellison,