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If you live in an established multicultural society, you are probably better at reading facial expressions and emotions than people who live in more insular countries, scientists claim.

This is because people who live in countries built by immigrants do not always share a common language or culture, so they rely more on nonverbal expressions of emotion to show others what they are thinking.

The phenomenon doesn't apply to new multicultural countries though, because people's skills in interpretation need to develop over time.

People who live in established multicultural societies are better at reading facial expressions and emotions than those in more insular countries, experts claim. A stock image of people from different cultures are shown

Researchers led by the University of Wisconsin-Madison found people who live in countries that have benefited from migrants from a wide range of countries over time, are more emotionally expressive.

'We think an absence of shared language and shared culture would push people toward greater nonverbal expression of emotion,' said Professor of psychology, Paula Niedenthal.

'Because otherwise you wouldn't know what the other person was feeling or thinking or liking or disliking.

'And you need to be able to communicate those things to facilitate commerce and government, to survive and prosper together.'

The study, published in the journal PNAS, compared several social and demographic variables to the way people describe the rules for displaying emotion in dozens of countries.

Researchers led by the University of Wisconsin-Madison found people who live in countries built on centuries of migration from a wide range of other countries such as the US, are more emotionally expressive. A stock image of China Town in San Francisco is pictured

It looked at countries such as the US, Canada, Australia and Brazil, which are built on centuries of migration from a wide range of other countries and compared them with inhabitants from homogenous countries such as Greece, Japan, Poland and Nigeria.

They found that while shaping emotional culture takes time over generations, the number of countries where immigrants originate from made little difference.

'In many countries, today's diversity involves a lot of minority influx,' Professor Niedenthal explained.

'Those people are often arriving at the bottom of the social ladder, hoping to find work, and people in those positions don't immediately influence the culture. 

'It takes time and generations and standing for that to happen.'

The study found that despite differences, people across the world identify the same three kinds of smiles - reward, affiliation and dominance - and that the frequency with which the three are deployed also vary in parallel with a country's historical heterogeneity, or multicultural nature.

'Two of the main tasks you could imagine being important to a group of people with mixed cultural backgrounds are affiliation, creating and maintaining social bonds, and reward - telling people what's good and what's bad,' he added.

'In homogenous cultures, they have hierarchies that have been established over the course of many, many generations, and they tend to view dominance smiles as more frequent or important.'