A new study says that the faces on Lego minifigures have become less happy and more often mad or sad. The study was designed to find out if the Lego characters have become grumpier over the years.
Christoph Bartneck works at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. He loves Lego and even worked for the company in the 1990s. He worked with another researcher on the project. They looked at all of the 6,000 figures made between 1975 and 2010. They made a note of each figure’s facial expression: happy, grumpy, afraid, surprised or satL They discovered that while in 1980, all of the figures were described as “smiley”, and that by 1990, only about 80 per cent of them had been “smiley” . And by 2010, just 50 per cent of the figures had had a smile on their little plastic faces.
The researchers are wondering how the increasingly sad, angry and unhappy faces on the Lego figures will affect the children who play with them. “Children’s toys can have an important influence on children,” said Bartneck on the university’s website. While Lego hasn’t issued an official response to the study, Bartneck said he thought the reason why Lego was producing angrier-faced characters was that children wanted them. He said it was likely that people wanted Lego characters to have different expressions, rather than just being sunny all the time. He said most of the unhappy faces were on characters based on a specific theme such as Harry Potter or pirates (海盗).
Bartneck will present his findings at the International Conference on Human-Agent Interaction in Sapporo.
【小题1】What does the underlined word “grumpier” probably mean?A.Happier. | B.Angrier. |
C.Smarter. | D.Prettier. |
A.Bartneck has been studying Lego figures |
B.the quality of Lego figures has gone from bad to worse |
C.more and more Lego figures have lost their smiles |
D.Lego figures’ facial expressions have become less rich |
A.He likes to design different Lego figures. |
B.He is a professor who studies facial expressions. |
C.He wants to know the influence of unhappy figures on children. |
D.He writes to the government to explain why children love angry Lego figures. |
A.the history of the development of Lego figures |
B.Lego characters are getting angrier |
C.how Bartneck carried out his study |
D.the angrier expressions on Lego figures do great harm to children |