The Psychology and Culture differences behind the face-mask
Why wearing a face mask is popular in Asia, but not in the U.S. and Europe? Is there a difference in cultural perception towards face-masks?
Recently, there has been a joke on the internet saying Americans don’t wear face-masks because American Superheros also don’t like to cover up their faces. Even if they do, they tend to only wear masks that are not covering up the mouth. Batman, Flash, and Zorro are all perfect examples of this. In Asia, on the other hand, Ninjas and other heros tend to wear masks that cover the whole face, or parts of the eyes. So why is this the case?
Emotional perception across cultures
Facial expressions have always been considered as the universal language of emotion. An adult human-being can normally tell what the other person is feeling by learning emotional information from their faceial movments.
However, upon closer examination, many studies have shown that facial expression is NOT universal and there are indeed some cultural differences when it comes to facial expressions.
So how do cultures influences the way we interpret facial expressions of emotion?
An experiment that tracks eye movements when interpreting emotions have shown that across cultures; people look at different areas of the face to gather emotional information.
Let’s take a look at the Recognition section. Recognition is considered to be a basic biological skill required for effective social interactions It’s basically about how we recognise other people’s feelings.
The results shown that East-Asian participants tend to focus on the central region of the face around the nose and sometimes the eyes. Whereas, Western Caucasian participants recognise emotions from the eyebrows and the mouth region.
Another experiment tested how different cultures use different parts of the face to express emotional intensity. The main findings have shown that Eastern Asians represent their emotional intensity primarily with movements of the eyes in emotions such as happy, fear, disgust, and anger. Whereas Western Caucasians tend to represent emotional intensity with other parts of the face (the mouth)
Interestingly, in Japan’s internet culture, (^.^) is happy and (>.<) is angry. On the other hand, Western Culture use their emojis differently, :) is happy and :( is sad.
Just like the emotional intensity experiment mentioned above; the happy and angry emotion is often represented through the eyes in Eastern Asian Culture. Whereas, sadness is often represented through the mouth in Western culture.
In Chinese , there’s a word called “Yan Shen” (眼神), which rough translates to the emotions expressed through eyes.
In English, we usually just say he looks sad to describe a person that’s feeling sad. But in Chinese, we can say “眼神看起來很悲傷 (Yǎnshén kàn qǐlái hěn bēishāng)”, which means his eyes look like he is sad.
It is commonly perceived that in western culture, people tend to not suppress their emotions. By contrast, Eastern-Asian Culture is more of a collectivist culture and tend to prefer emotions with less intensity. With U.S. having an individualists culture; the idea of being seen and recognised is prominent that it could also prevent certain people from wearing masks. Unlike the social norm of mask-wearing culture in Eastern-Asia, face-masks have become an instrument of political divide in the US.
It could be interesting for future studies to include other sub-culture groups such as African-Americans and Asian-Americans. The American culture is fairly diverse, and is constantly being influenced by other sub-cultures and minorities. As we become more globalised, the cultural differences in psychology might one day be universal again.
Altogether, it’s possible that masks don’t hinder the ability to have social interactions with others in Asia. However, it could be a social barrier between individuals in the Western-Culture.
Why do I wear masks.
I’ve been in Taiwan for the last 8 months and even before Coronavirus, most people were wearing face-masks on a daily basis. When COVID-19 hits, I could not find a single person that’s not wearing a mask in public. Right now, Taiwan is one of the most successful country in battling the virus and there are still no domestic transmissions. But till today, people are still wearing masks and measuring temperatures.
When my brother went back to the Netherlands in mid June. He said it’s almost a parallel Universe. The mask-wearing practise is not a thing anymore despite the fact that domestic transmission is still prominent there. People are only required to wear them in public transportation. However, since the Dutch population is not as dense compare to Taiwan, so chances of transmitting is lower and the infections are also decreasing.
I’m still wearing masks today, and will do so continuously when I go outside. It takes just one careless person to bring the disease to the whole population.
So, please wear a mask, don’t be that guy.
