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Cross-Cultural Study on Facial Regions as Cues to
Recognize Emotions of Virtual Agents
Tomoko Koda 1 , Zsofia Ruttkay 2 , Yuka Nakagawa 1 , and Kyota Tabuchi 1
1 Faculty of Information Science and Technology, Osaka Institute of Technology
1-79-1 Kitayama, Hirakata, 573-0196 Osaka, Japan
koda@is.oit.ac.jp
2 Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design
Zugligeti ut 9-25, Budapest, Hungary
ruttkay@mome.hu
Abstract. This paper reports the preliminary results of a cross-cultural study on
facial regions as cues to recognize the facial expressions of virtual agents. The
experiment was conducted between Japan and Hungary using 18 facial
expressions of cartoonish faces designed by Japanese. The results suggest the
following: 1) cultural differences exist when using facial regions as cues to
recognize cartoonish facial expressions between Hungary and Japan. Japanese
weighed facial cues more heavily in the eye regions than Hungarians, who
weighed facial cues more heavily in the mouth region than Japanese. 2) The
mouth region is more effective for conveying the emotions of facial expressions
than the eye region, regardless of country. Our findings can be used not only to
derive design guidelines for virtual agent facial expressions when aiming at
users of a single culture, but as adaptation strategies in applications with
multicultural users.
Keywords: facial expression, virtual agents, character, cross-culture.
1 Introduction
Virtual agents are frequently used in virtual worlds, online applications and (serious)
games. In the current state of development of the virtual agent technology, virtual
agents can express emotions in their bodily behavior, first of all, by displaying facial
expressions. The culture of the virtual agent is relevant in relation to the culture of the
real human interlocutor. Moreover, there are training and simulation applications
emerging where the cultural identity and particularly, the bodily behavior is the major
learning component of the training application [1]. Such agents have been designed
under the assumption that their expressions are interpreted universally among all
cultures. The basis for this assumption is the early finding about the universality of
the 6 basic expressions - joy, surprise, fear, sadness and disgust - by Ekman [2]. Later
works by Ekman and colleagues indicated cultural differences in perceived intensity
of emotions [3, 4]. However, recent research indicates cultural differences in
recognizing human facial expressions. Elfenbein et. al. [5] have coined the term
cultural dialects of facial expressions: the cultural dialect, unlike a personal
 
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