Essay On Facial Expressions

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In the journal article When Familiarity Breeds Accuracy: Cultural Exposure and Facial Emotion Recognition by Hillary Anger Elfenbein and Nalini Ambady, they discuss an experiment where photographs of American and Chinese individuals showing different kind of facial expressions that outline their current state of emotion were presented to American and Chinese judges.

“… The photographs of American facial expression were judged more accurately and quickly than were the photographs of Chinese facial expressions. This is likely due to differences in the methods that the researchers used for creating these sets of stimulus materials. Whereas Ekman and Friesen (1976) created their American photographs with the goal of portraying intense versions of prototypical facial expressions that would be highly recognizable, by contrast Wang and Markham (1999) created their Chinese photographs with the goal of eliciting situationally appropriate facial expressions that would be relatively natural. These differences in the method of posing the facial expressions likely led to American expressions that were more intense but less authentic than the Chinese expressions…. These factors likely contributed to the main effects in our study, in which American photographs were generally better recognized than the Chinese photographs” (Elfenbein & Ambady, 2003)

Photographs of facial expressions by Chinese people were presented to Chinese judges and photographs of facial expressions by American people were presented to American judges. The result was that American judges had an higher rate in recognizing emotions through facial expressions than Chinese judges. This could track back to the cultural background of each group and how it affected their behavior...

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...ng that a sort of hierarchy within countries exist, and somehow they happen to sit on top of that vigorous pyramid.
The third and probably most well known quality of the American culture is the influence that the population derives from the media. The USA has the most extensive and diverse set of outlets that supply the people with a sheer number of different kinds of entertainment. This creation of melodramatic amusement has created a sort of illusion within some of those who spend more time in front of the television than others. Although to be fair, even though this trend might have started in the USA, any country with decent and above satellite and Internet coverage has that separated pool of individuals that are extremely influenced by entertainment and played-out fiction stories that has them detached from reality and alienated from the rest of the community.

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