Reading emotions – East vs. West

Filed in: blog | research    Tags: asians | caucasians | cross-cultural studies | multicultural romance | sociology

I found this while looking up information about facial characteristics and it was just too fascinating to ignore. Basically this study had Caucasian and Asian subjects look at faces and tracked their eye movements as they performed facial recognition tasks and identified emotions.

It found that when reading emotions, Caucasians tended to look at the face as a whole where Asians focused on the eyes. Thus, Asians in the study would miscategorize negative emotions such as mistaking fear for surprise, for instance. Asians would ignore changes in the mouth that would cue them in.

I doubly found this fascinating because the princess in my current manuscript, a very observant person who’s learned how to survive in court by reading peoples’ intentions, distinctly notes that the hero, a westerner, poses a different set of challenges for her because the way he reacts and displays emotions is so different from what she’s accustomed to. Nice touch, eh? Well, I thought so.

I found several other articles on the same study with some additional insight. First, that this behavior seemed to be cultural rather than genetic as Asians raised in Western cultures didn’t show the same tendencies. Another thought was that this may be adaptive behavior due to the fact that Asian culture tends to look down upon showing negative emotion in public so Asians trained themselves to look carefully at the eyes because facial expressions were not so open.

Science Daily article – Caucasians and Asians Don’t Examine Faces in the Same Way

I’m interested to see what people think of this. Isn’t it a great way to describe cultural differences into a multicultural relationship? There are subtle, ingrained differences in addition to the larger obvious ones.

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History and Worldbuilding

Filed in: blog | research    Tags: asian history | historical research | Tang dynasty | worldbuilding

My critique partners and I were chatting it up last night and the topic of writing historicals and research came up. They asked me how long I researched before I felt ready to write and I told them not much. I just jumped into the story and researched as I went along. Of course, I wasn’t going to set the stories in China at first.

I suddenly had flashbacks — five years of library visits, trolling Amazon, a gazillion internet searches. I have books on horses of the world, on walled cities in China, on the Tang dynasty, the Song Dynasty. Hours and hours on the Chinese History forum. Wow, now that I’m looking at my shelf, I have books on Chinese weapons, the Art of War and other military texts, Chinese landmarks. And I consider myself a “light” researcher. Don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story, I say. (I stole that from my mentor teacher, who always told me “Don’t let the truth get in the way of good teaching” when it came to science.)

Darn, it’s been a long ride. And it keeps going. I’m starting to research Taoism and demonology for my next project. No wonder historical authors want to stick to the same period for a while.

No matter how much you research an actual time, you still worldbuild around it. Or at least I do. Historians do it too. It’s the biased worldview that you start creating based on what you know. I have a loose construct of the regions of the Tang Dynasty mapped out in my head and the political structure. At some point, I have to start filling in blanks and making extrapolations of what kind of situation that would create.

Soon, you find something cool happening. You find that the history matches up with your worldbuilding as you continue to dig. There’s a certain way that empires rise and fall, I suppose. It’s all a feedback loop and, sooner or later, the stuff you’re making up isn’t so far from what could or did happen.

I’m still dreading the day someone smacks me down for gross historical inaccuracies. That’s okay. They would have had to read as much as I have to do it. Anybody that geeky deserves to wield the historical smackdown stick.

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