Cultural differences between Western and Eastern societies have been shown in many aspects of people’s behavior and cognitions. For example, evidence from subjective well-being research showed that Eastern societies are more likely to hold dialectical emotional styles compared to Western societies. In other words, people in Eastern societies are more likely to view positive and negative emotions as compatible, whereas those in Western societies are more likely to view them as in conflict with each other. These differences are perhaps due to differences in Eastern and Western philosophies (Schimmack et al., 2002). Similarly, attention studies have found that Eastern pay more attention to backgrounds during visual tasks, which enables the understanding of relationships between objects and changes, while Westerners pay more attention to the target, which enables understanding of the features of an object (Liu et al., 2013). McCarthy et al. (2006) suggested that when Westerners know the answer to a question, they tend to maintain eye contact, while Easterners were more evasive. In addition, when searching for the answer to a question, Westerners often look toward the sky, while Easterners look toward the ground.

Facial information, which conveys one’s racial identity, gender, and facial expressions, is very important to human socialization. As humans are social creatures, the accurate interpretation of another person’s facial information would help us to better navigate the social environment. Eye movement patterns when recognizing a face has been shown to be subject to cultural differences. For example, Blais et al. (2008) found that Western Caucasian participants reproduced a scattered triangular pattern of fixations for faces of both races and across tasks. On the Contrary, East Asian participants focused more on the central region of the face. Caldara et al. (2010) found that in a natural situation, Westerners paid more attention to the eyes when looking at an emotionally neutral face, while Chinese paid more attention to the nose. Those evidence suggests that there may be cultural differences in eye fixation patterns when gazing at a face.

Indeed, in Western culture, direct eye contact with others while communicating is usually encouraged (Argyle and Cook, 1976). Thus, due to cultural influences, the eyes may be more important than the nose and mouth for facial expression recognition in Western culture. Many studies that used Western participants and Western faces as stimuli support this view. For example, Vassallo et al. (2009) found that Western participants had more fixations and longer fixation durations on the eyes, in comparison to the nose and mouth, when attempting to identify emotions from faces. Additionally, evidence from the eye movements of Western individuals with social interaction problems, such as autism or social phobia, indicates that these individuals do not gaze directly at the eyes when asked to identify the facial expressions of others (Horley et al., 2003, 2004; Senju and Johnson, 2009a). This phenomenon, called “avoidance of eye contact,” may impair social behavior abilities. However, this phenomenon does not mean these individuals lack social skills—it could be a self-defense mechanism for avoiding anxious experiences, possibly due to negative critical statements given by others in the past, which is automatically activated when these individuals make eye contact with others (Schneier et al., 2011). This evidence indirectly confirms the importance of information in the eyes for recognizing facial expressions in Western cultures. Researchers proposed “the eye contact effect” to explain the benefit of looking at the eyes to infer emotional information, positing that making contact with others’ eyes could modulate recognition and activate the part of the social brain responsible for processing emotion (Emery, 2000; Senju and Johnson, 2009b). Thus, the eyes are critical for recognizing facial expressions in Western cultures.

In contrast, in Eastern, affected by the etiquette culture (one aspect of Confucianism), direct eye contact is considered rude and should be avoided while communicating (Argyle and Cook, 1976). This raises the question of whether individuals from Eastern cultures develop a different pattern from those from Western cultures when identifying facial expressions due to influences from their culture. This could explain why some people view the lower part of the face (nose and mouth) more than the eyes. Jack et al. (2009) found that people from Eastern cultures use more information from the upper part of a face to recognize a facial expression, including happy and neutral faces, which was not consistent with previous research (Cui et al., 2009; Caldara et al., 2010). In addition, Tan et al. (2012) found that rather than adopting the Eastern or Western fixation pattern, Malaysian Chinese participants use a mixed strategy by focusing on the eyes and nose more than the mouth. Thus, this inconsistency in previous studies requires further investigation using eye-tracking methodology.

We devised two experiments to test this question. Experiment 1 investigated whether Chinese participants developed a pattern of avoiding eye contact when identifying facial expressions displayed by Eastern faces. Experiment 2 which base on the outcome of Experiment 1, investigated whether this pattern due to the guidance of the first fixation point.

In this study, we asked if healthy individuals from Eastern cultures developed a pattern of avoiding eye contact when identifying facial expressions displayed by Eastern faces. To answer this question, we used eye-movement technology and designed two experiments to explore the fixation patterns of Chinese participants when they attempted to identify such expressions.

Experiment 1 demonstrated an opposite pattern compared to those of studies using Western samples (Vassallo et al., 2009)—the number of fixations and fixation durations were less for the upper part of the face (eyes) compared to the lower part of the face (nose and mouth). Experiment 2 repeated this finding and excluded the possibility of fixation point guiding.

This difference in fixation patterns between Eastern and Western participants could be explained by their respective customs during social interactions. In Western culture, direct eye contact during communication shows respect to others and is frequently encouraged (Argyle and Cook, 1976), as evidenced by the American maxim, “Don’t trust a man who won’t look you in the eye.” Therefore, in Western cultures, the eyes are viewed more often than the mouth and nose when gazing at a face. By contrast, in Eastern, due to the etiquette culture, direct eye contact when communicating is considered very rude and should be avoided (Argyle and Cook, 1976). Therefore, people from Eastern cultures view the eyes less often than the mouth and nose. However, our results partly contradict that of Jack et al. (2009), who found a superiority effect for the upper part of the face in participants from Eastern cultures when identifying all seven types of facial expressions (the six basic emotions plus a neutral face). It is possible that the difference in results is due to different AOI sizes. Our AOI for the lower part of the face was much bigger than that for the upper part of a face, which may lead to more fixations on the lower part. However, this was probably not the case, because Jack et al.’s (2009) participants fixated more on the eyes (Jack et al., 2009, Figure 1A, p. 1544), which is independent of the size of the AOI. Another possible reason for the difference was the stimuli used. Jack et al. (2009) used FACS-coded facial expressions (Biehl et al., 1997) as stimuli, which might be considered artificial. Indeed, the authors found superiority of the upper face even for happy faces, which contradicts the results of a study that used CAFPAS (Wang and Luo, 2005), a face database especially design for Chinese. Moreover, a study (Cui et al., 2009) that also used FACS-coded facial expressions did not find a superiority effect of the upper face when gazing at a happy face. Thus, we think the ecological validity of the FACS-coded facial expression is relatively low, leading to unreliable results.

Another interesting question is if this explanation holds true for each type of facial expression. For example, the recognition of a happy expression depends more on the lower portion of the face than the upper portion of the face (Cui et al., 2009). Therefore, our present finding of more and longer fixations for the lower portion of happy faces may mean that the eyes are simply not important for recognizing a happy face, thereby indicating that this was not due to the influence of Chinese culture. In contrast, it has been shown that recognizing a sad face depends more on the upper half of the face (Cui et al., 2009), so our finding of more and longer fixations for the lower portion of sad faces may be influenced by culture. Further research should include more types of facial expressions to ascertain if such eye movement patterns apply to other basic emotions, such as fear or surprise.

Another interesting outcome was that Sui and Ren (2007) found that fixation started at the right eye, while we found that fixation started primarily in the non-eye area; only a few fixations started at the eye, and they were at the left eye. The difference in materials may be one explanation. Although both studies used Asian participants, in the former study (2007), all actors displaying the emotion faces were from Western cultures, while in our study, Eastern actors were used. The in-group advantage (Zhang et al., 2011) in facial expression recognition suggests that there may be different fixation models while identifying native compared with non-native facial expressions. Further research could use eye movement technology to make a direct comparison between in- and out-group emotion faces to test this hypothesis.

The present experiment found that Chinese people showed a superiority effect of the lower portion of the face while identifying four facial expressions displayed by Chinese faces: happy, peaceful, sad, and angry.

MX was responsible for experiment design; data collection; writing; XL was responsible for experiment design, writing and revision; HL was responsible for experiment design and revision; HZ was responsible for writing and revision.

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.