When I first reached the internets, I was confused by the =), and then later, the ^_^. It kind of confused me a little bit until someone told me they were emoticons. Apparently, culture is
why we have different happy faces:
Intrigued, Yuki decided to study this phenomenon. First, he and his colleagues asked groups of American and Japanese students to rate how happy or sad various computer-generated emoticons seemed to them. As Yuki predicted, the Japanese gave more weight to the emoticons' eyes when gauging emotions, whereas Americans gave more weight to the mouth. For example, the American subjects rated smiling emoticons with sad-looking eyes as happier than the Japanese subjects did.
Not surprisingly, our expressions online mirror how we want to be interpreted. Also interestingly, the Japanese might be thus better at perceiving people's true feelings, since it's harder to fake eye signals.. =)
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