Aim

1. Yuki et al. (2007) asked whether culture affects which part of a face people use when they judge an emotion.
2. In some cultures feeling is kept subdued and in others it is shown openly, so Japan was taken as an example of the first pattern and the United States of the second, and the prediction was that Japanese participants would weight the eyes and American participants the mouth.

Procedure

1. In the first experiment 118 American students from Ohio State were compared with 95 Japanese students from Hokkaido.
2. Each participant rated six emoticons, which combined happy, neutral and sad eyes with happy, neutral and sad mouths.
3. Ratings were made on a scale from 1, meaning extremely sad, to 9, meaning extremely happy.
4. In the second experiment a fresh set of 87 American and 89 Japanese participants rated 60 edited photographs of real faces rather than emoticons, each shown for ten seconds.

Results

1. In the first experiment, emoticons with happier eyes were rated happier by the Japanese participants, at 5.81 against 2.99.
2. Emoticons with happier mouths were rated happier by the American participants, at 5.54 against 4.78.
3. The second experiment repeated the direction of the effect but with much smaller gaps, at 4.65 against 4.33 for the eyes and 5.48 against 4.85 for the mouths.

Conclusions

1. Reading non-verbal cues is culturally learned, because two groups looking at identical faces used different parts of them.
2. The authors were careful, and conceded that more than the eyes and the mouth is involved in reading a face.
3. The finding sits directly against a purely inherited account of non-verbal communication, since inherited signals should be read the same way by everyone.

Strengths

1. A strength is that it is a controlled cross-cultural design, so both groups saw the same stimuli under the same conditions and the comparison between them is a fair one.
2. A second strength is that the second experiment used real faces, which answers the criticism that emoticons are themselves culturally loaded and so could have produced the effect on their own.

Weaknesses

1. A weakness is that the faces with conflicting expressions superimposed on them look unnatural, and nobody meets a face like that in ordinary life, which lowers the validity of the task.
2. A second weakness is that the samples were students from a single university in each country, so generalising to whole national populations, let alone to other cultures, goes well beyond what was tested.

Turning this into marks

1. Name the sample sizes, the 1 to 9 scale and the two kinds of stimuli, and keep the emoticons with the first experiment and the photographs with the second.
2. Quote one pair of figures, such as 5.81 against 2.99 for the eyes, and say what it shows.
3. The mark most often lost is the link back to theory, so state that the study challenges a purely inherited account.