READING THE MIND IN THE FACE - A CROSS-CULTURAL AND DEVELOPMENTAL-STUDY

Previous work suggests only a small set of facial expressions can be i nterpreted universally with any reliability. This set is confined to t he six basic emotions. On the other hand, ''cognitive'' mental states (such as distrust, recognize, etc.) are held to be private, unobservab le, and therefore not available from facial expression. In Experiment 1, we report a study that challenges the notion of the lack of express ive facial correlates to cognitive mental states and tests whether a l arger range of mental states are not only detectable, but universally so. Paintings and drawings of faces by one contemporary British artist (Hockney) and one seventeenth-century Spanish artist (Velazquez) were shown to subjects, who were given a forced choice of two semantic opp osites as descriptors and asked to select the word that best described the character's mental state. Subjects from three different cultures (Britain, Spain, and Japan) showed good agreement in their judgement o f 8 out of II mental states from facial information: recognize, threat en, regret, astonished, worried, distrust, contempt, and revenge. Cult ural differences were only found on 3 out of the 11 mental states (sch eme, wary, and guilt). The seventeenth-century faces were easily inter preted, though the contemporary faces were marginally easier. This sug gests that a large range of subtle and complex mental states may be un iversally read in the face, highlighting the role that perception play s in our theory of mind. In Experiment 2, we tested two possible confo unding factors: (a) that subjects might have been using ''basic emotio n'' categories to make their judgements about complex mental states, o r (b) that they might simply have been making positive/negative judgem ents. Subjects (from the UK only) were therefore given the same stimul i as in Experiment 1, but this time their forced choice was between th e target word and a distracter that was a term describing a basic emot ion or a distracter that was another complex mental state term of the same valence (positive or negative) as the target term. The results re mained virtually unchanged relative to Experiment 1, suggesting that t hese judgements are quite subtle. In Experiment 3, we administered a m odified version of this test to British children, aged 8-11, in order to see whether there was any development in the ability to recognize t hese same mental states. Results showed no developmental change during this period, in that even the 8-year-old British children were at the adult level at recognizing 10 out of 11 of these mental states from t he facial expressions.