Cross-cultural study of avatar expression interpretations

Avatars are increasingly used to express our emotions in our online communications. Such avatars are based on the assumption that avatar expressions are interpreted universally among all cultures. This study aims to elucidate the following two issues: 1) Identifying cultural differences in interpreting avatars´ facial expressions. This is done by applying psychological findings on cultural differences in human facial expression recognition to the case of avatar expressions. 2) Identifying avatar facial expressions that are recognized differently across cultures. We conducted an open Web experiment to gather users´ interpretations of various avatar facial expressions from eight countries within Asia, North and South America, and Europe. The results showed: 1) Cultural differences do exist in interpreting avatar facial expressions, which confirms the psychological findings that physical proximity affects recognition accuracy. Japan had the highest recognition accuracy for avatar expressions designed by Japanese designers, followed by Korea. 2) There are wide differences among cultures in interpreting positive expressions, while negative expressions had higher recognition accuracy regardless of culture