A study on Chinese facial expressions - Chinese 'angers' and their recognition of the angers

摘要

Facial and bodily expressions of the various angers were found to be different in Chinese literature. Can Chinese discriminate each expression rightly? In order to investigate into this question, an experiment was conducted where 45 Chinese adults (22 males and 23 females) were asked to discriminate 31 short motion pictures including facial expressions of the five various angers and the six basic facial expressions of emotion. The results showed that the Chinese subjects could discriminate the five various anger expressions as well as the basic facial expressions. The results of the factor analysis suggested that during the discrimination task of the Chinese facial expressions the Chinese subjects used cognitive structure similar to that which Japanese use to discriminate Western facial expressions of emotion.