Or not.

It’s not just hap­pi­ness that’s per­ceived dif­fer­ently across cul­tures: facial expres­sions are too. Recent research ques­tion­ing the assump­tion that face pro­cess­ing and facial expres­sion recog­ni­tion is invari­ant has found that West­ern Cau­casians and East Asians dif­fer in how they process facial expres­sions.

It is a widely held belief that many basic visual processes are com­mon to all humans, inde­pen­dent of cul­ture. Face recog­ni­tion is con­sid­ered to be one such process, as this basic bio­log­i­cal skill is nec­es­sary for effec­tive social inter­ac­tions. Any approach aim­ing to under­stand face per­cep­tion must rec­og­nize, how­ever, that only a small part of the visual infor­ma­tion avail­able on faces is actu­ally used.

Specif­i­cally, West­ern Cau­casians use a tri­an­gu­lar focus pat­tern tak­ing in the major­ity of the facial fea­tures while East Asians con­cen­trate in the cen­tre of the face–particularly around the eyes. From a BBC inter­view with one of the study’s authors:

“Inter­est­ingly, although the eye region is ambigu­ous, sub­jects tended to bias their judge­ments towards less socially-threatening emo­tions — sur­prise rather than fear, for example.

“This per­haps high­lights cul­tural dif­fer­ences when it comes to the social accept­abil­ity of emotions.”

The BBC arti­cle also notes how this could be behind the dif­fer­ences between East and West emoti­cons (i.e. :-) vs. ^_^).