Accurate fake smile detecting collectivist Chinese

Random bit of knowledge from the paper:

In Eastern cultures, especially China, “one must NOT show ones' teeth when smiling” is a strict rule of discipline for women that has lasted thousands of years, ever since the Tang Dynasty (so the Mona Lisa's smile could also have been appreciated by ancient Chinese). Ancient Chinese women even used adornments around the mouth (e.g., fake dimples) to compensate for the lack of emotional information conveyed by the mouth during their closed-mouth smiles. A good example of such an historic and prevalent influence of cultural value on the role of the mouth in smiles can be illustrated by contrasting the smile emoticons used on the Internet by Easterners and Westerners. In common Western smile emoticons such as :-) or :), the mouth is exaggerated with a crimped line whereas the eyes are simplified as two dots. As a contrast, Japanese use smile emoticons with a simplified mouth but crimped eyes, e.g., (ʌ.ʌ) or (ʌ_ʌ) [16], [17], [18]. Chinese, especially females, go even further by not only adopting simplified mouth and crimped eyes, but also inusing them with the ancient tradition of attaching fake dimples, e.g., (*ʌ_ʌ*), ( = ʌ_ʌ = ), or (@ʌ_ʌ@) [19].

I think the distinction between Western and Eastern here may not accurately capture the temporal dynamics of this process. If one looks back at Western art -the "Mona Lisa example is apt- I think one would be hard to find examples of the big bright smile that seems to be favored in much of Western culture today.

Indeed, when I was collecting pictures for my "women from the 40s vs. women from the 2000s facial composites", I noticed how difficult it was to find pictures of the modern women that did not adopt the typical wide smile. I don't remember ever seeing an ancient Greek depiction of a modern-type smile, and the Greek meidiama was a decidedly closed-mouth affair, with the occasional depiction of satyrs slightly deviating towards a more open-mouth smile, but of a malevolent rather than pleasant bent.

Going back to the East Asian smile, this picture of an anime character seems to match the emoticon quite well, also making it obvious why "the eyes have it" when it comes to accurate detection of smiling:

PLoS ONE 6(5): e19903. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0019903

Eyes Are Windows to the Chinese Soul: Evidence from the Detection of Real and Fake Smiles

Xiaoqin Mai et al.

How do people interpret the meaning of a smile? Previous studies with Westerners have found that both the eyes and the mouth are crucial in identifying and interpreting smiles, yet less is known about Easterners. Here we reported that when asking the Chinese to judge the Duchenne and non-Duchenne smiles as either real or fake, their accuracy and sensitivity were negatively correlated with their individualism scores but positively correlated with their collectivism scores. However, such correlations were found only for participants who stated the eyes to be the most useful references, but not for those who favored the mouth. Moreover, participants who favored the eyes were more accurate and sensitive than those who favored the mouth. Our results thus indicate that Chinese who follow the typical Eastern decoding process of using the eyes as diagnostic cues to identify and interpret others' facial expressions and social intentions, are particularly accurate and sensitive, the more they self-report greater collectivistic and lower individualistic values.

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