A Cross-Cultural Analysis of Animated Representations of Emotions for Wearable Interfaces

Abstract

Although pervasive sensing technologies are increasingly capable of continuously detecting human emotional states, there is still a critical challenge: how to unobtrusively communicate this sensed data back to the user. Realistic avatars are effective but often unsuitable for the limited screen space and peripheral nature of wearable. Abstract geometric animation offers a promising, rapidly interpretable alternative, but its cross-cultural validity remains under-explored. This study investigates the universality of animated emotion representations. We conducted a comparative study with 105 participants from Poland and Turkey and analyzed how they map emotions to visual parameters, such as color, shape, size, speed, and animation type. The results indicate that color and object size are universally understood as carriers of emotional meaning, making them suitable for global visualization models. However, some cultural variation in dynamic range preferences was revealed by animation speed. These results lay the groundwork for developing generative visualization algorithms that translate continuous sensor data into intuitive, culturally relevant feedback for pervasive environments.

This manuscript is a preprint of an article accepted for presentation at the EmotionSense - 1st International Workshop on Human-centred Emotion-Awareness and Sensing in Pervasive Computing within The 24th International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (PerCom 2026), Pisa, Italy. The final published version may differ as a result of the publisher's production process