Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C or D on your answer sheet to indicate
the correct answer to each of the questions.
You can usually tell when your friends are happy or angry by the looks on their faces or by their
actions. This is useful because reading their emotional expressions helps you to know how to
respond to them. Emotions have evolved to help us respond to important situations and to convey
our intentions to others. But does raising the eyebrows and rounding the mouth say the same
thing in Minneapolis as it does in Madagascar? Much research on emotional expressions has
centered on such questions.
According to Paul Ekman, the leading researcher in this area, people speak and understand
substantially the same "facial language". Studies by Ekman's group have demonstrated that
humans share a set of universal emotional expressions that testify to the common biological
heritage of the human species. Smiles, for example, signal happiness and frowns indicate sadness
on the faces of people in such far- flung places as Argentina, Japan, Spain, Hungary, Poland ,
Sumatra ,the United States, Vietnam, the jungles of New Guinea , and the Eskimo villages north
of Artic Circle. Ekman and his colleagues claim that people everywhere can recognize at least
seven basic emotions: sadness, fear, anger, disgust, contempt, happiness, and surprise. There are,
however, huge differences across cultures in both the context and intensity of emotional displays
- the so called display rules. In many Asian cultures, for example, children are taught to control
emotional responses - especially negative ones- while many American children are encouraged
to express their feelings more openly. Regardless of culture, however, emotions usually show
themselves, to some degree , in people's behavior. From their first days of life, babies produce
facial expressions that communicate their feelings.
The ability to read facial expressions develops early, too. Very young children pay close
attention to facial expressions, and by age five, they nearly equal adults in their skill at reading
emotions on people's faces. This evidence all points to a biological underpinning for our abilities
to express and interpret a basic set of human emotions. Moreover, as Charles Darwin pointed out
over a century ago, some emotional expressions seem to appear across species boundaries. Cross
- cultural psychologists tell us that certain emotional responses carry different meanings in
different cultures. For example, what emotion do you suppose might be conveyed by sticking out
your tongue? For Americans, this might indicate disgust, while in China it can signify surprise.
Likewise, a grin on