Read My Face, But You Better Be Quick

A century's worth of research has said that facial expressions for basic human emotions are universal. No matter what culture you grow up in, an angry face is an angry face.

Now, some 2009 research by David Matsumoto, published in Psychological Science, suggests that universal facial expressions may actually "arm wrestle" with cultural display rules.

Cultural display rules are the "rules" for what are "appropriate" ways to show your emotions in your culture. In the middle east, you tear your clothes and throw dust in the air to show your grief. In the far east, you remain stoic and quiet.

Matsumoto's findings show that "facial emotional expressions start out universal, but then become culturally differentiated." His team studied thousands of photographs taken of jūdōka at the Athens Olympics in 2004 just after matches had ended. They looked at the immediate facial expressions and how quickly (if at all) the athletes changed their expressions.

The key finding was that athletes from collectivist cultures, such as China, tended to mask their emotional expressions more than athletes from individualistic cultures like America.

"These findings demonstrate that, across time, a given individual's emotional expressions in a single context can be both universal and culture-specific," the researchers said.

POP QUIZ: How quickly did the cultural display rules kick in after the initial facial expression?
ANSWER: Less than 2 seconds.

Nature and Nurture are judoing. The brain (nature) responds first, then culture(nurture) kicks in. Matsumoto and his colleagues believe that "the initial facial reaction is triggered automatically by subcortical brain structures, before more culturally specific modification is applied by the motor cortex."

Words you learned from this post: "jūdōka" (one who participates in Judo), "judoing" (what one is doing when she is competing in Judo).