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.

[asninn]

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.

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 :) and so on.

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 :-) 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.

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.)

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:No emoticons?

[Anonymous Coward]

The culture of old people.

But..

[Anonymous Coward]

if you are an islamist, do you try to imagine a turban or kufi on the one you are trying "cyber" with?

@:-E

Re:No emoticons?

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

"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.

Re:Triangle eyes

[Dogtanian]

Japanese animes also show a character who's under stress having a huge cross attached right from his forehead, or suddenly disappearing eyeballs and long black dashes coming out of the characters face. Anyone seen that on an actual real human, or it just me.

If you step back and take a detached look at Western (or more specifically, American-influenced) animation, you'll note that there are a number of conventions which don't really reflect reality per se. (For example, no-one ever had steam coming out of their ears when they got angry). It just happens that the Japanese ones look strange to you because you're not familiar with them.

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.

Emoticon Classes

[camperdave]

What is the ROFL emoticon?

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.

Re:No emoticons?

[Haeleth]

It's meant to be crying. The lower part of each semicolon represents a tear.

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.

Re:Emoticon Classes

[tronbradia]

I can't really interpret those Japanese ones in the least.

Re:No emoticons?

[FuzzyFox]

But people don't use their noses to communicate emotions.

Re:Backward?

[M3SS3NG3R]

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.

Re:Triangle eyes

[Anonymous Coward]

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.