Slashdot Mirror
Culture Determines Which Emoticon You Use
Ant writes "A LiveScience story discusses the cultural differences in interpreting facial expressions. The article notes that where you come from plays a large role in what part of the human face you use to determine another person's mood. That also includes communicating online with the usages of smiley faces. 'For instance, in Japan, people tend to look to the eyes for emotional cues, whereas Americans tend to look to the mouth, says researcher Masaki Yuki, a behavioral scientist at Hokkaido University in Japan ... In Japan, emoticons tend to emphasize the eyes, such as the happy face (^_^) and the sad face (;_;). "After seeing the difference between American and Japanese emoticons, it dawned on me that the faces looked exactly like typical American and Japanese smiles," he said.'"
That's interesting, because when I use emoticons, I generally tend to use the eye-emphasising forms - ^_^, ^.^ or even ^^. In fact, I'm using the first of these considerably less often than the latter two, where the eyes are even more prominent and all other facial features are reduced to just a single dot (representing the nose, in my interpretation) or removed entirely.
:) and so on.
:-) pretty much exclusively and despised the dashless versions, but over time, I first shifted to the dashless versions, and then away from those as well and to the caret emoticons.
It also depends on the context, though; the less personal the context is, the more I tend away from these emoticons. In very formal contexts, I wouldn't use any at all, of course, but in the area between "all emoticons are frowned upon" and "100% personal" (Slashdot would be a good example), I tend more towards things like
Interestingly enough, for me at least, there's also been a definite change over time; back in my BBS/FidoNet days, I used dashed forms like
And I'm not even Japanese. (I'm not a US-American, either, of course, but I think that in terms of fundamental cultural issues like this, US-Americans in general are still close enough to us Europeans for the study to apply to us as well.)
butter the donkey
It would be instructive to consider the Internet's small but active flounder population, whose emoticons look like this:
Notice the distinctive adaptation to a 'flounder-like' way of percieving faces. Of course you may object that internet-using flounders are imaginary. As a matter of fact, that's an objection was raised even by many prominent flounders when the 'unicorn flounder' smiley was first circulated:
-..)
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
I'm a young college-aged student, and I've definitely noticed a shift towards Japanese style emoticons like ^_^ from my peers. Even among those who use the "sideways" emoticons, certainly you would never see :-) -- the hyphen is considered superfluous, and a simple :) will do just fine.
:-) style smilies, which seems to really bug a lot of my friends.
Maybe I'm asocial, but because of this I've adopted the "retro"
#include ".signature"
The article reasons that Japanese attempt to suppress their emotions, but that cannot be the case. Looking into a person's eyes is very intimate interaction while looking at their lips would be more akin to hiding emotion.
Rules 1 and 2, asshat. :P
It's easy to fake a smile. It's more difficult to fake happiness or amusement shown through the eyes. Some cultures recognise this.
Deleted
The culture of old people.
if you are an islamist, do you try to imagine a turban or kufi on the one you are trying "cyber" with?
@:-E
"So what culture am I a part of if I want to strangle someone every time they use any kind of emoticon at all?"
Lighten up.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Humorous comics in general use a number of conventions and visual language which are almost second-nature to us- but only because we're used to and have grown up with them.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Emoticons tend to fall into three classes. The first class is the sideways face emoticon, the kind where if you tilt your head to the left, you see a face. eg :-) or 8^\
The second (newer) class of emoticons is the Japanese style, which is a horizontal rendition of the face: O_O (^.^)
The third class is the abbreviation class, which uses abbreviations words, and pseudo html to convey the meaning. eg. ROFL [grin] </sarcasm>
BTW, ROFL means Rolling On Floor, Laughing.When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
It's meant to be crying. The lower part of each semicolon represents a tear.
But people don't use their noses to communicate emotions.
splunge (n) -- A good idea.. but it could be lousy... and I'm not being indecisive!
Ancient Chinese texts have always been written in top-down, right-left fashion, although modern day Chinese is almost always written in horizontal, from left to right. In our case since all kanji, katakana and hiragana are read upright even if the reading direction is horizontal, it makes sense to have upright smilies as well. Furthermore, many Japanese smilies are obvious adaptations of expressive techniques used in comic books/anime. It doesn't surprise me at all why the Japanese smilies and western smilies look so different.
Yeah, it was especially curious considering that you're probably wrong. Maybe it was informative in the sense that it informed us of your incorrect beliefs?
It never ceases to amaze me what lack of respect Slashdotters oftentimes seem to have for science, despite their assurances to the contrary. This guy did a serious study of these things by asking groups of people to rate people's smiles. Apparently, the result of that study is that Japanese people look at the eyes more than their Western counterparts. What did you do? You suggest we "check some photos". Not only would whatever came out of doing so be worth very little, scientifically speaking, it's not even the point of the research. (The faces may look the same to you -- the whole objective with the study was to see if people look for different indicators of a smiling face, not if the faces actually differ, though they appear to do that as well).
Look, if you have some reason to suspect his study was flawed, that the researcher is being dishonest about his findings, that the people asked in the studies lied about their perceptions, by all means tell us. We might even agree with you. But as long as all you can suggest is that we "check some photos" I'll stick with the scientific method, thank you very much.