How are Kawaii (Cute) Fictional Characters Used in Japanese Advertising

How Fictional Worlds Are Created

Both adults and children have the ability to not only think about reality but also use their imaginations and create fictional worlds. This article describes the process by which world creation happens, drawing from philosophical and psychological treatments of this issue. First, world creators recognize the need to create a fictional world, as when starting a pretend game or opening a novel. T...

Unravelling Names of Fictional Characters

In this paper we explore the correlation between the sound of words and their meaning, by testing if the polarity (‘good guy’ or ‘bad guy’) of a character’s role in a work of fiction can be predicted by the name of the character in the absence of any other context. Our approach is based on phonological and other features proposed in prior theoretical studies of fictional names. These features a...

How iconic are Chinese characters?

Towards an Entertaining Natural Language Generation System: Linguistic Peculiarities of Japanese Fictional Characters

One of the key ways of making dialogue agents more attractive as conversation partners is characterization, as it makes the agents more friendly, humanlike, and entertaining. To build such characters, utterances suitable for the characters are usually manually prepared. However, it is expensive to do this for a large number of utterances. To reduce this cost, we are developing a natural languag...

The Power of Kawaii: Viewing Cute Images Promotes a Careful Behavior and Narrows Attentional Focus

Kawaii (a Japanese word meaning "cute") things are popular because they produce positive feelings. However, their effect on behavior remains unclear. In this study, three experiments were conducted to examine the effects of viewing cute images on subsequent task performance. In the first experiment, university students performed a fine motor dexterity task before and after viewing images of bab...