"Masaki Yuki, a behavioral scientist at Hokkaido University in Japan, and his colleagues asked groups of American and Japanese students to rate how happy or sad various computer-generated emoticons seemed to them. The Japanese gave more weight to the emoticons’ eyes when gauging emotions, whereas Americans gave more weight to the mouth. The American subjects rated smiling emoticons with sad-looking eyes as happier than the Japanese subjects did. Then he and his colleagues manipulated photographs of real faces to control the degree to which the eyes and the mouth were happy, sad or neutral. Again the researchers found that Japanese subjects judged expressions based more on the eyes than the Americans, who looked to the mouth. Expressive muscles around the eyes provide key clues about a person’s genuine emotions, thus Japanese people could be better than Americans at perceiving people’s true feelings." - Adriano