The central idea of this stimulating target article is that embodied simulation represents a critical feature to effectively decode the nature of a smile. I endorse the argument and also agree with Niedenthal et al. that the integrative approach they propose is timely and necessary to understand the decoding of smiles (and facial expressions). The model posited here by the authors summarizes their view, offering a novel vision and prompting many questions for future research. Niedenthal et al. state that:
The SIMS model has been largely developed using data collected in Western countries. Nevertheless, it is essential to note that cultural differences may modulate our account. Some clear predictions across cultures can be imagined and have been articulated elsewhere. (sect. 6, para. 3)
The authors cite their ongoing work in this regard (Niedenthal et al., in preparation). However, I think it is necessary that they clarify their view regarding the impact of culture and race from their theoretical position in the target article.
Human populations are marked by a variety of practices, beliefs, norms, and forms of organization. The term “culture” is typically used to describe the particular behaviors and beliefs that characterize a social or ethnic group, often located in a particular geographical location. Thus, by definition, culture represents a powerful deterministic and invisible force, which is responsible for shaping the way people think and behave. Importantly, culture also shapes the way people express their emotion. Westerners live in individualistic societies and tend to express their emotions explicitly. By contrast, Easterners live in collectivist societies and tend to suppress their emotions to maintain harmony amongst the group (Markus & Kitayama Reference Markus and Kitayama1991). More importantly, it has recently been shown that culture impacts not only upon visual perception, but also, critically, upon the extraction of information from faces.
My colleagues and I (Blais et al. Reference Blais, Jack, Scheepers, Fiset and Caldara2008) have recently shown that culture shapes how people deploy eye movements to sample information from the facial input space. Western Caucasian adults employ a well-established triangular fixation pattern during face learning, recognition, and categorization by race (Blais et al. Reference Blais, Jack, Scheepers, Fiset and Caldara2008). Contrary to intuition, East Asians direct fixations to the central area of the face, around the nose, for the very same visual categorization tasks, while reaching a comparable behavioral performance. The eye movement strategy deployed by the East Asian observers might not straightforwardly relate to gaze avoidance, since this cultural contrast in eye movement generalizes to other visually homogenous categories (Kelly et al. Reference Kelly, Miellet and Caldara2010) and is abolished in constrained viewing conditions (Caldara et al. Reference Caldara, Zhou and Miellet2010). However, these observations do not rule out the possibility that the eye movement strategy used by Easterners to process visually homogenous objects, might arise from facing a continuous pressure from the Eastern cultural norm promoting gaze avoidance during human face-to-face interactions (Knapp & Hall Reference Knapp and Hall2005).
In stark contrast with those previous findings in face recognition, East Asian observers, compared to Western Caucasian observers, oversample information from the eye region during the categorization of facial expressions (Jack et al. Reference Jack, Blais, Scheepers, Schyns and Caldara2009), ignoring information from the mouth region, even for the “happy” expression. Besides showing that the eye movement strategies deployed to decode facial expressions are culturally specific, our data also suggest that the transmission of facial expressions is not universal. Easterners focus uniquely on the eye region to decode signals, as they might expect expressive diagnostic signals coming from this facial region. Indirect evidence for this position is provided by the emoticons. While Westerners use a change in the mouth to convey a change from “happy” to “sad” with emoticons (i.e., :-) vs. :-( ), Easterners emphasize information from the eye region (i.e., ^_^ vs.; ^; ), with a neutral mouth. Critically, this perceptual bias towards the eyes for the Easterners generates confusions in facial expression decoding, particularly for the expressions of surprise, fear, anger, and disgust. Therefore, our eye movement data on face recognition showing the lack of direct gaze contact in Easterners, coupled with those on expressions showing that face expressive signals are culturally tuned, point to culturally specific decoding errors and perhaps the necessity of a culturally specific SIMS model. The confusion shown by East Asian observers in decoding particular facial expressions might arise from a lack of embodiment of Westerner expression signals, offering a novel interpretation to the cross-cultural impairment in facial expression decoding.
An interesting side note on this point: East Asian observers should potentially be better than Westerners in categorizing fake and genuine smiles, as they concentrate (and perhaps develop a particular expertise for) their fixations on the eyes only.
Human populations are also marked by physiognomic variations. Race is a universal, socially constructed concept used to rapidly categorize humans originating from different geographical locations by salient physiognomic variations (i.e., skin tone, eye shape, etc.). Humans are markedly better at recognizing same- compared to other-race faces. Our studies advocate the existence of finely tuned mechanisms to process same-race (SR) faces, probably developed as a by-product of visual experience (e.g., Caldara & Abdi Reference Caldara and Abdi2006; Michel et al. Reference Michel, Caldara and Rossion2006a; Reference Michel, Rossion, Han, Chung and Caldara2006b), which drive the rapid categorization of other-race faces (e.g., Caldara et al. Reference Caldara, Thut, Servoir, Michel, Bovet and Renault2003; Reference Caldara, Rossion, Bovet and Hauert2004; Vizioli et al. Reference Vizioli, Foreman, Rousselet and Caldara2010). But more interestingly for the present framework, recent evidence suggests that such ingroup/outgroup categorization also has an impact in many social cognition judgments. It has been demonstrated that the neural responses to empathy of pain are modulated and interact with ingroup/outgroup membership (Xu et al. Reference Xu, Zuo, Wang and Han2009). As a consequence, one would once again predict that the race of the observers, coupled with culture, would impact upon the embodying and decoding of facial expressions and favor the existence of specifically tuned ingroup SIMS models.
Regardless of the precise role of culture and race in the novel model put forward by Niedenthal et al., this target article makes a significant contribution in the field and reminds us that integrative approaches are necessary to achieve an understanding of complex human social behaviors and interactions.
The central idea of this stimulating target article is that embodied simulation represents a critical feature to effectively decode the nature of a smile. I endorse the argument and also agree with Niedenthal et al. that the integrative approach they propose is timely and necessary to understand the decoding of smiles (and facial expressions). The model posited here by the authors summarizes their view, offering a novel vision and prompting many questions for future research. Niedenthal et al. state that:
The SIMS model has been largely developed using data collected in Western countries. Nevertheless, it is essential to note that cultural differences may modulate our account. Some clear predictions across cultures can be imagined and have been articulated elsewhere. (sect. 6, para. 3)
The authors cite their ongoing work in this regard (Niedenthal et al., in preparation). However, I think it is necessary that they clarify their view regarding the impact of culture and race from their theoretical position in the target article.
Human populations are marked by a variety of practices, beliefs, norms, and forms of organization. The term “culture” is typically used to describe the particular behaviors and beliefs that characterize a social or ethnic group, often located in a particular geographical location. Thus, by definition, culture represents a powerful deterministic and invisible force, which is responsible for shaping the way people think and behave. Importantly, culture also shapes the way people express their emotion. Westerners live in individualistic societies and tend to express their emotions explicitly. By contrast, Easterners live in collectivist societies and tend to suppress their emotions to maintain harmony amongst the group (Markus & Kitayama Reference Markus and Kitayama1991). More importantly, it has recently been shown that culture impacts not only upon visual perception, but also, critically, upon the extraction of information from faces.
My colleagues and I (Blais et al. Reference Blais, Jack, Scheepers, Fiset and Caldara2008) have recently shown that culture shapes how people deploy eye movements to sample information from the facial input space. Western Caucasian adults employ a well-established triangular fixation pattern during face learning, recognition, and categorization by race (Blais et al. Reference Blais, Jack, Scheepers, Fiset and Caldara2008). Contrary to intuition, East Asians direct fixations to the central area of the face, around the nose, for the very same visual categorization tasks, while reaching a comparable behavioral performance. The eye movement strategy deployed by the East Asian observers might not straightforwardly relate to gaze avoidance, since this cultural contrast in eye movement generalizes to other visually homogenous categories (Kelly et al. Reference Kelly, Miellet and Caldara2010) and is abolished in constrained viewing conditions (Caldara et al. Reference Caldara, Zhou and Miellet2010). However, these observations do not rule out the possibility that the eye movement strategy used by Easterners to process visually homogenous objects, might arise from facing a continuous pressure from the Eastern cultural norm promoting gaze avoidance during human face-to-face interactions (Knapp & Hall Reference Knapp and Hall2005).
In stark contrast with those previous findings in face recognition, East Asian observers, compared to Western Caucasian observers, oversample information from the eye region during the categorization of facial expressions (Jack et al. Reference Jack, Blais, Scheepers, Schyns and Caldara2009), ignoring information from the mouth region, even for the “happy” expression. Besides showing that the eye movement strategies deployed to decode facial expressions are culturally specific, our data also suggest that the transmission of facial expressions is not universal. Easterners focus uniquely on the eye region to decode signals, as they might expect expressive diagnostic signals coming from this facial region. Indirect evidence for this position is provided by the emoticons. While Westerners use a change in the mouth to convey a change from “happy” to “sad” with emoticons (i.e., :-) vs. :-( ), Easterners emphasize information from the eye region (i.e., ^_^ vs.; ^; ), with a neutral mouth. Critically, this perceptual bias towards the eyes for the Easterners generates confusions in facial expression decoding, particularly for the expressions of surprise, fear, anger, and disgust. Therefore, our eye movement data on face recognition showing the lack of direct gaze contact in Easterners, coupled with those on expressions showing that face expressive signals are culturally tuned, point to culturally specific decoding errors and perhaps the necessity of a culturally specific SIMS model. The confusion shown by East Asian observers in decoding particular facial expressions might arise from a lack of embodiment of Westerner expression signals, offering a novel interpretation to the cross-cultural impairment in facial expression decoding.
An interesting side note on this point: East Asian observers should potentially be better than Westerners in categorizing fake and genuine smiles, as they concentrate (and perhaps develop a particular expertise for) their fixations on the eyes only.
Human populations are also marked by physiognomic variations. Race is a universal, socially constructed concept used to rapidly categorize humans originating from different geographical locations by salient physiognomic variations (i.e., skin tone, eye shape, etc.). Humans are markedly better at recognizing same- compared to other-race faces. Our studies advocate the existence of finely tuned mechanisms to process same-race (SR) faces, probably developed as a by-product of visual experience (e.g., Caldara & Abdi Reference Caldara and Abdi2006; Michel et al. Reference Michel, Caldara and Rossion2006a; Reference Michel, Rossion, Han, Chung and Caldara2006b), which drive the rapid categorization of other-race faces (e.g., Caldara et al. Reference Caldara, Thut, Servoir, Michel, Bovet and Renault2003; Reference Caldara, Rossion, Bovet and Hauert2004; Vizioli et al. Reference Vizioli, Foreman, Rousselet and Caldara2010). But more interestingly for the present framework, recent evidence suggests that such ingroup/outgroup categorization also has an impact in many social cognition judgments. It has been demonstrated that the neural responses to empathy of pain are modulated and interact with ingroup/outgroup membership (Xu et al. Reference Xu, Zuo, Wang and Han2009). As a consequence, one would once again predict that the race of the observers, coupled with culture, would impact upon the embodying and decoding of facial expressions and favor the existence of specifically tuned ingroup SIMS models.
Regardless of the precise role of culture and race in the novel model put forward by Niedenthal et al., this target article makes a significant contribution in the field and reminds us that integrative approaches are necessary to achieve an understanding of complex human social behaviors and interactions.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The author is supported by The Economic and Social Research Council and Medical Research Council (ESRC/RES-060-25-0010).