Cultural Differences - Are you ^.^ or :-) ?

Stumbled across this study of cultural differences and the way people use different facial cues in reading emotions. It involved people from East Asia (who tended to focus most on the eyes) and Europe (a combination of eyes and mouth). Small sample size but seems to align with other studies.

I paste here one section of the article relating to emoticons.

"Emoticons are used to convey different emotions in cyberspace as they are the iconic representation of facial expressions," Jack said. "Interestingly, there are clear cultural differences in the formations of these icons." Western emoticons primarily use the mouth to convey emotional states, e.g. : ) for happy and : ( for sad, she noted, whereas Eastern emoticons use the eyes, e.g. ^.^ for happy and ;_; for sad.