Facial expressions are crucial to human social communication, but the extent to which they are innate and universal versus learned and culture dependent is a subject of debate. Two studies explored the effect of culture and learning on facial expression understanding. In Experiment 1, Japanese and U.S. participants interpreted facial expressions of emotion. Each group was better than the other at classifying facial expressions posed by members of the same culture. In Experiment 2, this reciprocal in-group advantage was reproduced by a neurocomputational model trained in either a Japanese cultural context or an American cultural context. The model demonstrates how each of us, interacting with others in a particular cultural context, learns to recognize a culture-specific facial expression dialect.

We conducted two experiments to investigate the psychological factors affecting the attractiveness of composite faces. Feminised or juvenilised Japanese faces were created by morphing between average male and female adult faces or between average male (female) adult and boy (girl) faces. In experiment 1, we asked the participants to rank the attractiveness of these faces. The results showed moderately juvenilised faces to be highly attractive. In experiment 2, we analysed the impressions the participants had of the composite faces by the semantic-differential method and determined the factors that largely affected attractiveness. On the basis of the factor scores, we plotted the faces in factor spaces and analysed the locations of attractive faces. We found that most of the attractive juvenilised faces involved impressions corresponding to an augmentation of femininity, characterised by the factors of 'elegance', 'mildness', and 'youthfulness', which the attractive faces potentially had.

Face recognition and the PCA Results obtained through psychological experiments have suggested that relationships exist between these impressions and the physical features of a face [5-10]. These studies have mainly argued what kind of physical features are related to impressions regarding gender, age, or physical attractiveness. Some studies examined the correlations between the physical features of faces and subjective judgments using manipulated line drawings [5, 6] or face photographs [7, 8]. These studies treated simple

Some psychological studies have shown that changes in gaze direction trigger reflexive shifts of attention. The cortical region responding to eye gaze has connections with both of the two visual pathways responsible for spatial orientation and feature analysis. The purpose of the present study was to examine the effect of gaze-triggered attention on these two visual functions. Participants engaged in both location and orientation discrimination tasks with an uninformative gaze cue. The results indicate that the gaze direction of a schematic face facilitates responses only in the location discrimination task, and not in the orientation discrimination task. These results suggest a specific contribution of gaze perception to the processing of spatial orientation information. Moreover, further analysis of the data revealed that the compatibility between the gaze direction and the target location would be retained in implicit short-term memory.

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