Abstract
Avatars are increasingly used to express our emotions in our online communications. Such avatars are used based on the assumption that avatar expressions are interpreted universally among all cultures. This paper investigated cross-cultural evaluations of avatar expressions designed by Japanese and Western designers. The goals of the study were: (1) to investigate cultural differences in avatar expression evaluation and apply findings from psychological studies of human facial expression recognition, (2) to identify expressions and design features that cause cultural differences in avatar facial expression interpretation. The results of our study confirmed that (1) there are cultural differences in interpreting avatars’ facial expressions, and the psychological theory that suggests physical proximity affects facial expression recognition accuracy is also applicable to avatar facial expressions, (2) positive expressions have wider cultural variance in interpretation than negative ones, (3) use of gestures and gesture marks may sometimes cause counter-effects in recognizing avatar facial expressions.
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Acknowledgments
Experiments 1 and 2 were conducted by a Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (A) (15200012, 2003-2005) from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS). Experiment 3 was conducted by a Grant-in-Aid for Young Scientists (Start-up: 2006–2007) and a Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C) 20500196, 2008–2010) from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS). The work at Augsburg University was funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) under research grant RE 2619/2-1 (CUBE-G).
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Koda, T., Ishida, T., Rehm, M. et al. Avatar culture: cross-cultural evaluations of avatar facial expressions. AI & Soc 24, 237–250 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-009-0214-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-009-0214-5