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.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Rickel, J., Marsella, S., Gratch, J., Hill, R., Traum, D., Swartout, B.: Towards a New Generation of Virtual Humans for Interactive Experiences. IEEE Intelligent Systems, 3–38 (July/August 2002)
Ekman, P., Friesen, W.V.: Constants Across Cultures in The Face And Emotion. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 17, 124–129 (1971)
Ekman, P., Friesen, W.V., O’Sullivan, M., Chan, A., Diacoyanni-Tarlatzis, I., Heider, K., Krause, R., LeCompte, W.A., Pitcairn, T., Ricci-Bitti, P.E., Scherer, K.R., Tomita, M., Tzavaras, A.: Universals and Cultural Differences in The Judgment of Facial Expressions of Emotion. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 53, 712–717 (1987)
Matsumoto, D., Ekman, P.: American-Japanese Cultural Differences in Intensity Ratings. Motivation and Emotion 13, 143–157 (1989)
Elfenbein, H., Beaupré, M., Leveque, M., Hess, U.: Toward a Dialect Theory: Cultural Differences in Expressing and Recognizing Facial Expressions. Emotion 7, 131–146 (2007)
Ruttkay, Z.: Cultural Dialects of Real and Synthetic Emotional Facial Expressions. Journal of AI & Society 24(3), 307–315 (2009)
Mori, M.: Bukimi no Tani: The Uncanny Valley (Translated by MacDorman, K. F., Minato, T.). Energy 7(4), 33–35 (1970)
Ishiguro, H.: Android Science: Toward a New Cross-disciplinary Framework. In: CogSci 2005 Workshop: Toward Social Mechanisms of Android Science, pp. 1–6 (2005)
Koda, T., Ishida, T., Rehm, M., Andre, E.: Avatar Culture: Cross-cultural Evaluations of Avatar Facial Expressions. Journal of AI & Society 24(3), 237–250 (2009)
Jack, R.E., Blais, C., Scheepers, C., Schyns, P.G., Caldara, R.: Cultural Confusions Show Facial Expressions are Not Universal. Current Biology 19(18), 1543–1548 (2009)
Yuki, M., Maddux, W.W., Masuda, T.: Are the Windows to the Soul the Same in the East and West? Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 43, 30–311 (2007)
Breazeal, C.: Emotion and Sociable Humanoid Robots. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 59(1-2), 11–155 (2003)
Breazeal, C.: Sociable Robots. Journal of the Robotics Society of Japan 24(5), 591–593 (2007)
Van Breemen, A.J.N.: ICat: Experimenting with Animabotics. In: AISB Creative Robotics Symposium (2005)
Ruttkay, Z., Noot, H.: Animated CharToon Faces. In: International Symposium on Non-photorealistic Animation and Rendering, pp. 91–100 (2000)
Ekman, P., Friesen, W.V.: Facial Action Coding System: A Technique for the Measurement of Facial Movement. Consulting Psychologists Press, Palo Alto (1978)
Ekman, P., Friesen, W.V.: Unmasking the Face: A Guide to Recognizing Emotions from Facial Cues. Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs (1975)
Fridlund, A.J.: Human Facial Expression: An Evolutionary Review. Academic Press, San Diego (1994)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
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
Download citation
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
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)