Cross-cultural study on facial regions as cues to recognize emotions of virtual agents

Authors:
Tomoko Koda;Zsofia Ruttkay;Yuka Nakagawa;Kyota Tabuchi
Affiliations:
Faculty of Information Science and Technology, Osaka Institute of Technology, Hirakata, Osaka, Japan;Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design, Budapest, Hungary;Faculty of Information Science and Technology, Osaka Institute of Technology, Hirakata, Osaka, Japan;Faculty of Information Science and Technology, Osaka Institute of Technology, Hirakata, Osaka, Japan
Venue:
Culture and computing
Year:
2010

Citing 5
Cited 3

Animated CharToon faces

NPAR '00 Proceedings of the 1st international symposium on Non-photorealistic animation and rendering
Toward a New Generation of Virtual Humans for Interactive Experiences

IEEE Intelligent Systems
Emotion and sociable humanoid robots

International Journal of Human-Computer Studies - Application of affective computing in human—Computer interaction
Avatar culture: cross-cultural evaluations of avatar facial expressions

AI & Society - Special Issue: Enculturating Human-Computer Interaction, Guest Editors: M. Rehm, Y. Nakano, E. André, T. Nishida
Cultural dialects of real and synthetic emotional facial expressions

AI & Society - Special Issue: Enculturating Human-Computer Interaction, Guest Editors: M. Rehm, Y. Nakano, E. André, T. Nishida

From cartoons to robots part 2: facial regions as cues to recognize emotions

Proceedings of the 6th international conference on Human-robot interaction
Culture-related differences in aspects of behavior for virtual characters across Germany and Japan

The 10th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems - Volume 2
Culture-related topic selection in small talk conversations across Germany and Japan

IVA'11 Proceedings of the 10th international conference on Intelligent virtual agents

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.00

Visualization

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.