Culture Shapes How We Describe Facial Expressions

From Darwin through Wittgenstein to contemporary scientific investigations, it has been argued humans tend to view facial expressions through a mentalistic lens. According to this view, when looking at someone's expressive face, we see emotion and are unable to describe the face in behavioral terms, i.e., name the details of facial movements. At the same time, however, a growing body of work shows cultures in fact differ in the degree of importance they attribute to mental states and willingness to discuss them. Is this variation reflected in the linguistic coding of facial expressions? To explore this, we conducted two facial expression naming tasks targeting mental states and facial movements with speakers of Maniq (Austroasiatic, Thailand) and Polish (Indo-European, Poland), representing highly diverse linguistic and cultural settings. We found that, while Polish speakers conformed with the predicted orientation towards mental states, this did not hold for Maniq speakers. The Maniq were instead oriented towards behavioral aspects of faces, naming them more frequently, more precisely, and with higher consensus, compared to the Polish. These differences are carved into the Maniq and Polish lexicons, suggesting diverse cultures exhibit differential specialization in verbalizing expressive faces.