【备战2015】全国2015届高考英语试题89月分类汇编 C单元 阅读理解 C8 科普知识类(含解析).doc

C8 科普知识类 【英语卷（解析）·2015届云南省玉溪一中高三上学期第一次月考（201409）】C People from East Asia tend to have more difficulty than those from Europe in distinguishing facial expressions---and a new report published online in Current Biology explains why. Rachael Jack, University of Glasgow researcher, said that rather than scanning evenly across a face as Westerners do, Easterners fix their attention on the eyes. “We show that Easterners and Westerners look at different face features to read facial expressions,” Jack said. “Westerners look at the eyes and the mouth in equal measure, while Easterners favor the eyes and ignore the mouth.” According to Jack and her colleagues, the discovery shows that human communication of emotion is more complex than previously believed. As a result, facial expressions that had been considered universally recognizable cannot be used reliably to convey emotion in cross-cultural situations. The researchers studied cultural differences in the recognition of facial expressions by recording the facial movements of 13 Western people and 13 Eastern people while they observed pictures of expressive faces and put them into categories: happy, sad, surprised, fearful, disgusted, or angry. They compared how accurately participants read those facial expressions using their particular eye movement strategies. It turned out that Easterners focused much greater attention on the eyes and made significantly more errors than Westerners did. “The cultural difference in eye movements that they show is probably a reflection of cultural difference in facial expressions,” Jack said. “Our data suggest that while Westerners use the whole face to convey emotion, Easterners use the eyes more and mouth less.” In short, the data show that facial expressions are not universal signals of human emotion. From here on, examining how cultural factors have diversified these basic social skills will help our understanding of human emotion. Otherwise, when it comes to co