Danah sez, "A new study is out showing cultural differences in reading cues. Japanese folks focus on people's eyes to get nuanced expression information while Americans tend to focus on the mouth. The most interesting part of all of this is that it plays out in the emoticons that folks use:"
So when Yuki entered graduate school and began communicating with American scholars over e-mail, he was often confused by their use of emoticons such as smiley faces :) and sad faces, or :(.
'It took some time before I finally understood that they were faces,' he wrote in an e-mail. 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.
(Thanks, danah!)
