CS Yuki’s Study Of Emoticons

Question 1

What was the aim of Yukis study of emoticons

Answer 1

To investigate if a persons culture affects how facial cues are used when understanding other peoples emotions.

Question 2

What was Yukis method in the study of emoticons

Answer 2

LAB
Yuki showed American and Japanese students emoticons with 6 different combinations of happy, neutral, sad eyes and mouths
Participants were asked to give a rating between 1 to 9 for how happy they thought that emoticon was

Question 3

What were the results of Yuki’s study of emoticons

Answer 3

The Japanese students gave the highest ratings to the faces with happy eyes and the American students gave the highest ratings to the face with the happy mouths
Japanese students gave the saddest to faces with sad eyes
Americans lowest ratings with sad mouths

The results show that Japanese and American people understand facial expressions differently and give more weight to different parts of the face when interpretating another persons emotions
J= eyes
A= mouth

Question 4

What is the conclusions of Yuki’s study of emoticons

Answer 4

Yuki concluded this happened because people learn their own cultural norms about expression and interpretation of emotions

The exults may be related to how openly a culture expresses emotions. E.g. eye muscles are not as easy to control as the mouth so the eyes may be seen as the most truthful facial cue in cultures that limit their emotional expressions (such as japan)
In cultures such as the US where open emotional expression is normal the mouth may be seen as the best guide to interpret emotions

Question 5

States 3 limitation of Yuki’s study of emoticons

Answer 5

One limitation is that Yuki had a limited sample
The sample in both conditions (USA and Japan) were students no younger or older people , limit the generalising ability of the findings limits how we can apply to how the general population interprets social cues
This means that we know how students of these cultures read faces but not if this is trues for others

Another limitation of Yukis study is it only tested 2 emotions
The study only looked at two elements of emotions happy and sad not any other emotions
This makes the results harder to generalise to real life where people express a full range of emotions. This means that we know how happy and sad faces are interpreted but not other emotions.

Yuki used an artificial stimuli
Yuki used computer generated faces to test participant not real faces and although standardised no more or less appealing to any of the participants they are not natural and we don’t walk around streets looking at emoticons
This decreases the ecological validly of the results and mean that they have limited generalisablitlity to a real life scenarios where we interpret real faces. It tells us how computer generated faces are interpreted but we don’t know if this is true for real faces

Question 6

State one strength of Yuki’s study of emoticons

Answer 6

Yuki’s study provided insight into non verbal communication
Yuki’s study is important as it provides support for the theory that non-verbal behaviours is learned to some extent because different cultures learn different way to interpret facial expressions
This makes Yuki useful in psychology because it provides valuable insight into the origins of non verbal behaviour and may call darwin theory into question