Is Everybody Happy?

Psychologist Takahiko Masuda and his colleagues at the University of Alberta asked two groups of university students - one in North America and the other in Japan if a character in a drawing is happy. To the North Americans, the boy looked happy. But to the Japanese, his emotional state depended for more on the four other children around him.
If the four were frowning, the Japanese tended to give the figure in the middle a lower score on a 10-point scale for happiness.
Not so the North Americans, who spent less time looking at the other faces, and made their assessment based on the middle kid's grin.
This suggests, says Dr. Masuda, that Westerners see emotions as individual feelings, while Japanese see them as inseparable from the feelings of the group. He grew up in Japan but did graduate work in the United States before coming to Edmonton. Moving between cultures gave him the idea for the experiment.
In North American, he says, people believe that facial expressions are connected to emotions. In Japan, focusing too much on a person's expressions or behaviour is not seen as a good way to understand them. " We use the words 'read the air' which means understand the atmosphere of a situation" says Dr. Masuda.
His findings will be published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
Interesting cultural contrast about how we feel in social situations.