<P> Culture also affects people's facial expression . An experiment done by the University of Glasgow shows that Western Caucasians and East Asians have different understanding of the facial expression signals of the six basic emotions, which are the so - called "universal language of emotion"--happy, surprise, fear, disgust, anger and sadness . The results show that Western Caucasians tend to distribute their expressive features across the face, including eyebrows and mouth; while the East Asians tend to use their eyes to express most of the emotions, especially by changing the direction of gazing, which turns out to be more subtle than the Westerners . </P> <P> This phenomenon can also be explained by using the high - and low - context culture theory . By mapping the performance on facial expression and the cultural backgrounds of the participants, we can tell that more exaggerated expressions of emotion tend to correlate with relatively lower - context culture (Western Caucasian culture), while subtler facial expressions belong to higher - context culture (East Asian culture). This is because, in a low - context cultural environment, people tend to express themselves as explicitly as possible . Thus exaggerating facial expression becomes a complementary tool for further elaboration of the speaker's meaning, conveying the speaker's emotion vividly and effectively avoiding misunderstanding . </P> <P> By contrast, a high - context culture usually assumes a significant pool of "taken for granted" shared knowledge . High - context people believe that limited amount of information should be enough for successful communication, which means the "complementary tool" function of facial expression becomes less important here . Hence people coming from high - context cultural background tend to express their emotion via facial expression more subtly; as exemplified by this study, in which East Asians convey most of their feeling via their eyes . </P> <P> Marketing makes it clear when it comes to high - and low - context cultures . If we take Japan as an example, advertising is very colorful, full of images, gestures and sounds with powerful meaning behind them . Dialogue is only one part of the advertising; it is not central . Every vocal and non-vocal expression is explored when the consumers are part of a high - context culture, and they are very sensitive to it . McDonald's advertising is very different in places like Japan, when compared to the United States . It uses more colors, movements and sounds, while the American version is more straightforward ." </P>

Examples of high context and low context culture