Emotional Responses to Chinese Characters: Exploration for Simplified, Traditional Chinese and Japanese Typefaces

Abstract

Chinese characters developed for the writing of Chinese and have adapted for a number of Asian languages. Basically, the simplified forms of Chinese characters are used in mainland China, Singapore, and Malaysia. The corresponding traditional characters are used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau. They also remain a key component of Japanese known as kanji. In this study, we arrange the information about the development of Chinese characters and the evolution of typical typefaces in Chinese and Japanese. To explore the relationships between emotions and Chinese characters, 20 simplified types and 20 traditional types of Chinese were extracted and the kansei evaluation experiment was conducted for the people in mainland China and Taiwan. Besides, we collected the emotional evaluation data of Japanese typefaces to explore the emotional difference between Chinese and Japanese. Particularly, it is found that for the widely used types Heiti, Songti, and Kaiti, the people in mainland China and Taiwan have opposite feelings of classic and contemporary. The emotional response for these types is generally consistent between the people in Taiwan and the people in Japan.