Cross-cultural Study of Perception and Acceptance of Japanese Self-adaptors

This paper reports our preliminary results of a cross-cultural study of perception and acceptance of cultural specific self-adaptors performed by a virtual agent. There are culturally-defined preferences in self-adaptors and other bodily expressions, and allowance level of expressing such non-verbal behavior are culture-dependent. We conducted a web experiment to evaluate the impression and acceptance of Japanese culture specific self-adaptors and gathered participants from 8 countries. The results indicated non-Japanese participants' insensitivity to the different types of self-adaptors and over sensitivity to Japanese participants' to stressful self-adaptors.