Face Value

(With thanks to The Straits Times www.straitstimes.com )
Mar 11, 2010

Taking emotions at face value

By Andy Ho

LATE last month, Mr Akio Toyoda appeared before a United States congressional
committee investigating the Toyota recall crisis.


Betraying little emotion, the Toyota president stoically faced hostile
questioning by angry US lawmakers. He would say how 'deeply sorry' he was but
as Democratic Representative Marcy Kaptur snapped: 'Where is the remorse?'


Stunned, the Japanese said quietly through an interpreter that he was 'trying
to speak from my heart, but I understand the criticism that my explanation
does not go far enough'.


The answer was articulate in Japanese - which is characterised by
indirection, the avoidance of direct speech or personal pronouns as well as a
degree of opacity and inscrutableness. But the elliptical subtlety was lost
in translation.


At one point, Democratic Representative Ed Towns, who chaired the committee,
burst out: 'What I'm trying to find out: Is that a 'yes' or a 'no'?'


But the fireworks came from only the Americans themselves. US Transportation
Secretary Ray LaHood, for instance, was combative and dismissive of some
lawmakers who queried him. Mr LaHood - the tough individual who speaks up,
voices an opinion and defends it robustly - offered a performance that US
culture valorises. It is said to exemplify the American virtues of
transparency and honesty.


But these are precisely values that a Confucianist culture disavows. The
corporate titan in Japan is no rock star a la Steve Jobs. The best leader
stays away from the public eye and works behind the scenes to make sure his
firm prospers.


An explicit 'no' is considered rude while forcing someone to unambiguously
admit in public to an error would be disharmonious. Instead, people avoid
confrontation by resorting to elliptical speech and concession making.


The overriding objective is to save face, which keeps peace in society. Note
that Mr Toyoda's public apology tendered in Beijing later was received much
better in that Confucianist culture.


So there was a clash of cultural values on Capitol Hill. But surely emotions
cut across cultures? Since the 1970s, research on involuntary cues in the
facial muscles that point to one's real state of mind has consistently
confirmed that a universal set of 'basic emotions' exists across cultures.
These include happiness, surprise, fear, sadness, anger and disgust.


Emotions constitute a way of knowing where one stands in one's world. For
instance, fear is a way of knowing there may be a threat in one's
surroundings. In this sense, emotions serve as self-markers in
individualistic cultures and relationship-markers in collectivist cultures.


But all cultures may not employ exactly the same facial expressions to
express emotions. Research shows that Caucasians are more accurate in
recognising (among themselves) the facial expressions of happiness, fear,
anger and disgust - but not surprise or sadness.


By contrast, Chinese are most consistent in recognising facial expressions
(among themselves) of happiness, sadness and anger - but not fear or surprise
and especially not disgust.


Surprisingly, there is little peer-reviewed research to show how accurately
(or inaccurately) individuals might perceive the expression of emotions by
others of a different ethnicity. In fact, one of the best studies was
published only in 2002 in the journal Cognition & Emotion: How Americans and
Japanese assessed facial expressions of varying intensities in the other
nationality was observed.


While both groups tended to categorise facial expressions in a similar way,
the intensity of expressions gave rise to different interpretations.
(Emotions are usually classified by their intensity and their
pleasantness/unpleasantness.)


With low-intensity expressions, Japanese were inclined to believe that the
subject was, in reality, harbouring much more intense emotions than he let
on. In contrast, with high-intensity expressions, Americans tended to believe
that the subject was likely to be faking them.


So while Mr Toyoda would not have missed how upset with him the US lawmakers
were, he could have emoted slightly more intensely - but not so much as to
render his hostile hosts overly sceptical.


It would have helped too if he spoke English idiomatically as well but he
does not. Most languages have only a limited number of words for the basic
emotions. But second-order emotions, like contriteness, are even more
difficult to express.


Some are untranslatable from one language to another. Thus, 'ijirashi' is
used in Japanese for that emotion the native experiences on seeing an
honourable person scaling an insurmountable hurdle. The English word
'gratifying' does not carry all its subtle connotations that make more sense
intuitively within a collectivist culture.


The Eskimos and Yorubas don't have a word for 'anxiety'. Then there is 'malu'
in Malay - glossed in English as 'shame' - that can be elicited by two
completely different sets of conditions, either failure or inferiority (even
when there is no failure). As University of California, Los Angeles
anthropologist Daniel Fessler writes in Beyond Nature Or Nurture: Biocultural
Approaches To The Emotions, the example of 'malu' shows that one human
emotion could have two logics.


All these things work together so that cross-cultural miscues are par for the
course. It was inevitable that Mr Toyoda would be flagellated for the
emotional disconnect of his performance within the inner sanctum of American
culture.