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Cross-Cultural Study on Facial Regions as Cues to Recognize Emotions of Virtual Agents

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 6259))

Abstract

This paper reports the preliminary results of a cross-cultural study on facial regions as cues to recognize the facial expressions of virtual agents. The experiment was conducted between Japan and Hungary using 18 facial expressions of cartoonish faces designed by Japanese. The results suggest the following: 1) cultural differences exist when using facial regions as cues to recognize cartoonish facial expressions between Hungary and Japan. Japanese weighed facial cues more heavily in the eye regions than Hungarians, who weighed facial cues more heavily in the mouth region than Japanese. 2) The mouth region is more effective for conveying the emotions of facial expressions than the eye region, regardless of country. Our findings can be used not only to derive design guidelines for virtual agent facial expressions when aiming at users of a single culture, but as adaptation strategies in applications with multicultural users.

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Koda, T., Ruttkay, Z., Nakagawa, Y., Tabuchi, K. (2010). Cross-Cultural Study on Facial Regions as Cues to Recognize Emotions of Virtual Agents. In: Ishida, T. (eds) Culture and Computing. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6259. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-17184-0_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-17184-0_2

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-17183-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-17184-0

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