Facial Expressions: East vs. West
By swikan on August 13th, 2009Posted In: Technique
From Lucky Star
Even comic book novices can tell the difference between a Japanese Manga/Anime style comic and a Western-style comic: The Eastern-style character has large expressive eyes with small nose and mouth. Emotions are expressed with symbols and backgrounds. A Western-style character has a face of even proportions and emotions are expressed with exaggerated mouth expression and posture/gestures.
Why is there such a fundamental difference between the comic art of the two cultures? Researchers may have the answer:
The two distinct comic styles may have developed because of how the two cultures read facial expressions. In a report published in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, western people scan the entire face to interpret emotions whereas eastern people focus on the eyes:
“We show that Easterners and Westerners look at different face features to read facial expressions,” said Rachael E. Jack of The University of Glasgow. “Westerners look at the eyes and the mouth in equal measure, whereas Easterners favor the eyes and neglect the mouth. This means that Easterners have difficulty distinguishing facial expressions that look similar around the eye region.”
In comics and animation, Easterners draw their characters with large, expressive eyes. Western artists show facial features in a more even proportion. It’s all based on where the artist looks to read emotion.
People from East Asia tend to have a tougher time than those from European countries telling the difference between a face that looks fearful versus surprised, disgusted versus angry… Rather than scanning evenly across a face as Westerners do, Easterners fixate their attention on the eyes.
Since it is tougher to convey fear and surprise using just the eyes, Eastern artists rely on symbols and shapes to help convey the emotion or mood. Western artists use body posture and mouth expression to convey the mood.
The study’s press release did not mention the connection between their findings and the comic art of the two cultures, but they did mention this:
“Emoticons are used to convey different emotions in cyberspace as they are the iconic representation of facial expressions,” Jack said. “Interestingly, there are clear cultural differences in the formations of these icons.” Western emoticons primarily use the mouth to convey emotional states, e.g. : ) for happy and : ( for sad, she noted, whereas Eastern emoticons use the eyes, e.g. ^.^ for happy and ;_; for sad.
Did you find this article interesting? Please be sure to pass it on!
Also, please share your thoughts on this topic in the comments below.
Hmmm. That gives new meaning to manga. Nice to dig into the reasons why art differs.
thanks, Scott Austin! And thank you for coming by the blog!
That’s interesting. I wonder if the differing ways of reading facial expressions are related to East Asian culture’s supposed greater emphasis on keeping one’s emotions private and presenting a calm, composed facade in public at all times. If that’s the goal you’re taught to strive for from an early age, it’s probably a lot easier to train yourself not to let your mouth fall into telltale half-smiles or grimaces than it is to suppress all trace of subtler reactions expressed via the eyes, such as blinking, widening the eyes in shock, etc. Under this hypothesis, in such a culture the eyes would logically be the primary feature to check for emotional cues, since the average person would be making a greater effort to suppress more overt expressions involving other parts of the face.
Margaret: I think your observation is very insightful. And to take it full circle, east Asians would grow up peering at the eyes of their parents/friends to determine emotions behind the words, which would lead both to the results of the study I referred to above, and the reason east Asian artists exaggerate the size of the eyes (so there is more ROOM to convey expression in their culture).
[...] Here’s an interesting summary of some tesearch on the different facial features in manga and Western comics. It boils dpwn to an [...];