Cross-cultural communication -- much more than just a linguistic stretch

Mandarin-speaking Chinese more likely to read emotions in voices of others; English-speaking North Americans rely more on facial expressions

If you are a Mandarin-speaker from China and want to understand how someone else is feeling, you are likely to concentrate on their voice rather than on their face. The opposite is true for English-language speakers in North America, who tend to "read" the emotions of others in their facial expressions rather than in their tone of voice. These cultural/linguistic differences run so deep that they are to be found not only in terms of behaviour, but even at the level of brain activity, according to a study recently published by McGill researchers in Neuropsychologia.

The researchers arrived at this conclusion by using an electroencephalogram (EEG) to measure brain activity as they asked the participants (20 Mandarin-speakers and 19 English- speakers, all of whom were based in Montreal) to identify the emotions being expressed in a series of vocal and visual cues. The researchers believe that Mandarin-speakers' rely more on tone of voice rather than on facial cues to understand emotion compared to English-language speakers. This may be due to the limited eye contact and more restrained facial expressions common in East Asian cultures.
_________________
Reference:

EurekAlert. 2015. “Cross-cultural communication -- much more than just a linguistic stretch”. EurekAlert. Posted: February 24, 2015. Available online: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-02/mu-cc-022415.php