Emotional Contagion with Artificial Others. Effects of Culture, Physical Appearance, and Nonverbal Behavior on the Perception of Positive/Negative Affect in Avatars (original) (raw)
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53rd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2020
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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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Intercultural collaboration, 2007
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 any cultures. However, our former study showed there are cultural differences in interpreting avatar facial expressions. This paper summarizes the results of cross cultural evaluations of avatar expressions among five Asian countries. The goals of this study are: 1) to investigate cultural differences in avatar expression evaluation and apply findings from Psychological study in human facial expression recognition, 2) to identify design features that cause cultural differences in avatar facial expression interpretation. The results confirmed that 1) there are cultural differences in interpreting avatars' facial expressions among Asian countries, and the psychological theory that suggests physical proximity affects facial expression recognition accuracy is also applicable to avatar facial expressions, 2) use of gestures and gesture marks may sometimes cause counter-effects in recognizing avatar facial expressions.
Frontiers in Digital Humanities, 2018
In human-to-human contexts, display rules provide an empirically sound construct to explain intercultural differences in emotional expressivity. A very prominent finding in this regard is that cultures rooted in collectivism-such as China, South Korea, or Japan-uphold norms of emotional suppression, contrasting with ideals of unfiltered self-expression found in several Western societies. However, other studies have shown that collectivistic cultures do not actually disregard the whole spectrum of emotional expression, but simply prefer displays of socially engaging emotions (e.g., trust, shame) over the more disengaging expressions favored by the West (e.g., pride, anger). Inspired by the constant advancement of affective technology, this study investigates if such cultural factors also influence how people experience being read by emotion-sensitive computers. In a laboratory experiment, we introduce 47 Chinese and 42 German participants to emotion recognition software, claiming that it would analyze their facial micro-expressions during a brief cognitive task. As we actually present standardized results (reporting either socially engaging or disengaging emotions), we manipulate participants' impression of having matched or violated culturally established display rules in a between-subject design. First, we observe a main effect of culture on the cardiovascular response to the digital recognition procedure: Whereas Chinese participants quickly return to their initial heart rate, German participants remain longer in an agitated state. A potential explanation for this-East Asians might be less stressed by sophisticated technology than people with a Western socialization-concurs with recent literature, highlighting different human uniqueness concepts across cultural borders. Indeed, while we find no cultural difference in subjective evaluations of the emotion-sensitive computer, a mediation analysis reveals a significant indirect effect from culture over perceived human likeness of the technology to its attractiveness. At the same time, violations of cultural display rules remain mostly irrelevant for participants' reaction; thus, we argue that inter-human norms for appropriate facial expressions might be loosened if faces are read by computers, at least in settings that are not associated with any social consequence.
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The trend for online interactions, can be regarded as being ‘anti-socially social’, meaning that a great deal of time is spent playing, working and socializing with the internet serving as the communication conduit. Within that Virtual Social Environment very deep relationships are formed and maintained without the parties ever having met each other face-to-face. Raising the question how much does the physical appearance of an avatar influence the perception of the person behind it? Are relationships informed by appearance even in the virtual world and what implications does that have for second language acquisition? This paper leads to a small-scale research project where a selection of avatars with various racially identifiable characteristics were used to identify which avatars a second language speaker would feel more at ease interacting with in the target language. The resultant research aims to test three hypotheses regarding preferred avatar choice for second language users b...
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