Scientists Prove Emoticons Are Not Universally Understood (qz.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Quartz: The most recent such study, published Oct. 24 in the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, examined how emotions expressed in symbols and pictures are understood in three nations with varying degrees of internet connectivity and access: Japan, Cameroon, and Tanzania. Psychologists from the University of Tokyo tested subjects on how well they recognized emotions in emoticons and photographs. Participants across cultures could read emotion accurately in images of real people regardless of race -- but symbolic tech expression was not universally comprehensible. The study subjects were shown photographs of happy, neutral, and sad Caucasians, Asians, and Africans and told to describe the emotions expressed in the images. Generally, participants accurately assessed the feelings expressed across the board. The researchers noted one difference: African participants tended to confuse Asian neutral and sad faces, "perhaps due to lack of exposure to the out-group [Asian] faces," they suggest.

When it came to symbols, however, the scientists found clear cultural differences in emotion recognition. Subjects from all three countries were given a tablet, on which they were asked to scroll through a series of emoticons. They were shown emoticons in the Japanese style, with happiness, sadness, and neutrality expressed in the eyes; in a western style with emotion expressed in the mouth; and "smiley face" emoticons (pictured above). The Japanese subjects fluently read emotion in emoticons, whereas subjects from Cameroon and Tanzania found emoticons utterly mystifying at similar rates. This was true both for urban and rural dwellers in both African nations. The researchers believe this is due to the varying levels of internet exposure in the three countries.

Comments

Re:Thank you...

[DontBeAMoran]

Emoticons are made from regular characters, such as :p and ;)

Emojis are unicode characters of their own, represented by a dedicated graphic for each character.

A potential long-term issue

[Pollux]

I wonder if any historians may actually be concerned about this.

Thinking back to my college days, there is much of antiquity that is not well understood due to the inability to understand its written languages. The Rosetta Stone was an as incredible as it was rare. So much history is locked away in written language that will likely never be understood. (See this page for some examples.) A culture's language is its bridge to understanding the culture itself.

If emoticons are linguistically ambiguous, we run a risk that our culture will not be understood in the future, either.

Re:I don't blame the Africans,

[Dutch Gun]

I've been exposed to enough anime that I'm starting to learn spoken Japanese. I still think (T_T) looks more cynical than crying rivers, so I think that emoticon is just culturally distinct on its own merits. Most westerners are simply more familiar with the sideways emoticons, not the Japanese versions. :-) :-| :-( :-P :-/ >-(

We sort of forget that we didn't intrinsically *know* these things. We actually had to learn them along with everything else we take for granted in these modern times. So, in the case of Japanese, with enough cultural conditioning, you would probably eventually learn to interpret those emoticons the same way. I'm not sure I'd ascribe any deeper meanings in the results, such as how "Japanese look for emotion in the eyes, Westerners in the mouth" as the paper apparently did.

What's strange is the line from the writeup "In other words, we don’t all see glee in this glyph : )" which wasn't at all supported by the study's conclusion (not that we can actually READ it). From what I understand, we all DO see glee in that glyph. It was the other two Japanese emoticons that confused non-Japanese, especially Africans.