The research team of Professor Akihiro Tanaka of the Department of Psychology, Department of Psychology and Communication, Faculty of Contemporary Arts, Tokyo Women's University, Ms. Misako Kawahara, a graduate student of the same university, and Associate Professor Disa Sauter of the University of Amsterdam (Netherlands) is an international research team of Japanese and Dutch. Through comparative experiments, Dutch people are consistently sensitive to the facial expressions of the other person regardless of age when reading the other person's emotions, while Japanese gradually become more sensitive to the tone of the other person's voice as they grow older. I found that it was going to be.
Correctly reading the emotions of the other person in the conversation is necessary for smooth communication, and in face-to-face conversation situations, not only the facial expression but also the tone of the voice is a clue to know the emotions of the other person.According to the research conducted by Professor Tanaka and others, the way the emotions read from the face and the emotions read from the voice are connected differs depending on the culture, and East Asians are more sensitive to the tone of voice than Westerners. Was revealed.However, it has not been examined whether such cultural differences in the mechanism that connects the five senses seen in adults already existed from childhood or appeared during adulthood.
Therefore, we conducted an experiment on a total of 296 Japanese and Dutch children and adults to investigate how to connect emotional information read from the face and voice to judge the emotions of the other person. bottom.
Experiments have shown that between 11-12 year olds and adults, as in previous studies, Japanese are more likely to focus on voice emotions than Dutch.However, at the age of 5 to 6, both Japanese and Dutch tended to pay more attention to their faces, and there was no cultural difference.In other words, it was clarified that the cultural difference in how to connect emotional information read from the face and voice does not exist from early childhood, but appears with development.
It is not yet clear why the Japanese people change to pay attention to the tone of their voice as they grow up, but Japanese adults really like "laughing with their faces and crying with their hearts". If you tend not to show it on your face, it is possible that you will gradually pay attention to your voice by gaining the experience of trying to read the true intention hidden in the false expression from your voice while you are an adult. Can be considered.
Applying the results of this study to daily life, for example, when a Japanese mother pays attention to a child, the child's facial expression does not convey the fact that even if he cares about the eyes of others and scolds him with a smile while smiling. It can be explained that it is because it is easy to judge emotions.
The results of this research are expected to lead to the elucidation of the mechanism that causes cultural differences in the mechanism that connects heterogeneous sensory information such as vision and hearing in the brain, and the elimination of inconsistencies in emotional communication between different cultures and generations. ..
Paper information:[Cognition and Emotion] Culture shapes emotion perception from faces and voices: Changes over development
