Cultural Difference of Simplified Facial Expressions

Abstract

In this study, we succeeded in creating facial expressions with the minimum number of elements required to recognize a face. The elements are two eyes and a mouth made of an exact circle, which are geometrically transformed by rotation and vertical scaling transformations to create facial expressions. The facial expression patterns created by the geometric elements and transformations are constructed using three-dimensional visual information: the tilt (slantedness) of the mouth, the openness of the face, and the tilt (slantedness) of the eyes, which have been suggested by many previous studies. The relationship between the emotional meaning of the visual information was also consistent with the results of previous studies. The authors found that facial expressions can be classified into ten emotions: joy, anger, sadness, disgust, fear, surprise, anger*, fear*, neutral (pleasant) indicating positive emotions, and neutral (unpleasant) indicating negative emotions. We also investigated cultural differences in impressions of the above simplified facial expressions, and report that there are no significant differences in Japan and Denmark.