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.'"

Comments

non-human emoticons

[kahei]

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:

-..)

Let :-) Reign Supreme!

[eklitzke]

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.

Maybe I'm asocial, but because of this I've adopted the "retro" :-) style smilies, which seems to really bug a lot of my friends.

Re:The most enigmatic one

[Panseh]

For instance, in Japan, people tend to look to the eyes for emotional cues, whereas Americans tend to look to the mouth... Maybe Japanese actually spend time looking at the face, while Americans are looking somewhere else and catching a glimpse of the mouth by chance.

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.

Re:/b/tards

[Mikachu]

Rules 1 and 2, asshat. :P

The mouth lies

[Colin Smith]

It's easy to fake a smile. It's more difficult to fake happiness or amusement shown through the eyes. Some cultures recognise this.

Re:Emoticon Classes

[freeweed]

Um..

Count me in the vast group of people that have been online well over a decade, are familiar with virtually all Internet terminology, and have never, EVER heard of "ROFL" being referred to as an "emoticon".

Notice the term itself - emoticon. A portmandeau of "emotion" and "icon". The last part is a hint that there's something semi-graphical about it. Abbreviations don't exactly fit this term, in the slightest.

In fact, use of things like ROFL and LOL pre-date the emoticon phenomenon in my experience. Heck, humanity was using abbreviations like this for years before we even had computers (KISS, FUBAR, etc). I don't think retconning them as emoticons makes any sense, and in fact you're the first person I've ever seen try to do that.

Re:No emoticons?

[h2g2bob]

I mean... it's just a way to communicate more efficiently

That's right, they DO serve a purpose. Text is very easy to mis-read, especially if it contains sarcasm or jokes. Humans normally use facial expressions and tone of voice to convey this information, which isn't part of email or IM. Emoticons show this.