Are minifigs' faces grumpier than before, and is this important?

[Legogal]

A study of the facial expressions of minifigs measured whether they are grumpier now than in the past. And it questions whether this makes a difference in a toy for children.

Check out the article describing the study at:

http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/06/11/18904238-do-legos-need-anger-management-figurines-grumpier-than-ever-study-says?lite

Wish I had been able to do research on minifigs in my earlier life as a professor! Sounds like a dream job, eh?

Edited June 12, 2013 by Fugazi
edited link

[Dannylonglegs]

The link doesn't seem to be working for me.

I think there are more grumpy minifig faces nowadays than before. (they only really started making grumpy heads around the time of "Adventures" and "Aquanauts." I personally think the issue is just about fig diversity over everything else. The Lego company has really been upping the level of diversity recently, what with unpleased faces, faces with different facial hair, and even aliens and whatnot. I like having a diverse cast of faces to use for my minifigures, and having grumpy faces is a great boon in that regards. They've also really instituted the dual-face, allowing figures to have either a happy or sad face. (My opinion on the dual faces is not-offended, but I don't really love them.) So, yes, more grumpy figures, and I like it. They're useful for MOCs.

Also, I'm not sure this is the correct part of the forum to discuss this... maybe it'd fit better in the Lego General Discussion part.

~Insectoid Aristocrat

Edited June 12, 2013 by Dannylonglegs

[obsidianheart]

Than before what?

When I was a kid, everyone had the basic smiley. If you wanted a purist alternative, you slapped a 1x1 round brick on a neck stud and called it a robot. Then Pirates came along and changed the game.

So i'd say that going to having a third of the faces be grumpy from having, say, none of them... Then yes, they're more grumpy.

And my Agents bad guys sure are glad (er, grumpy. You know what I mean).

[prozac]

Just a cute article I found on my news homepage: http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/06/11/18904238-do-legos-need-anger-management-figurines-grumpier-than-ever-study-says?lite

[LEGO Guy Bri]

That's pretty funny. I had no idea that happy vs. angry faces was close to 50/50, or that there was even a study. So, I guess I'll end with my posts with ( )

[timmyc1983]

Haha that is quite amusing! I think it's more realistic having the different array of facial expressions; as the kid said, some people are mean. I think most kids would understand that minifigs are toys anyway, the smart one would and let's face it, only smart kids play with LEGO anyway!

[Rick]

A study of the facial expressions of minifigs measured whether they are grumpier now than in the past. And it questions whether this makes a difference in a toy for children.

Just a cute article I found on my news homepage: http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/06/11/18904238-do-legos-need-anger-management-figurines-grumpier-than-ever-study-says?lite

Merged and moved to General.

[Legogal]

I, too, prefer different facial expressions because it increases the variety of minifigs and makes them much more interesting. I collect female minifigs, and the facial differences give them more personality. So it works for more than just pirates and super agents. And dual heads are perfect for changing the mood in a scene....like who smiles all of the time anyway.

Never thought I would see a study of their facial expressions!

[Peppermint_M]

It depends on what you call grumpy I suppose.

There are a lot more faces I would call, um... Intense? I suppose... That look of concentration and determination that a lot of the knights and the ninjas have.

If you take into account the CMFs, there are a lot of more nuetral and happy faces than angry. Like the motorcycle mechanic guy, he just looks like a bloke you'd see on the street (or is that just becuase my neighbour is big into those hogs?).

In series 10 we have:

6 Nuetral Faces (Fielder, Soldier, Mechanic, Captain, Grandpa, Librarian)

4 Happy Faces (Painter, Mr Gold, Bumble Bee Girl and Trendsetter)

1 Intense face (Paintballer)

1 Sad Face (yuh-doy)

1 Monster Face, while a neutral expression, some people might take the fact she is green and turns people to stone the wrong way

1 random expression, the skydiver's windblown face.

1 Grumpy Face (Tomohawk/Mohawk warrior)

2 Angry Faces. (Roman, Amazonian)

I am beginning to think this robotics guy (who just wanted to get into the papers?) is making a fuss about nothing. Also, where on earth does he qualify to say anything about faces on toys and child psychology?

Methinks a simple study on the actual expressions on LEGO figures over the past few years (or even in the history of figures) to offer a rebuttle.

[Mr. Elijah Timms]

Interesting enough article. I wish the scholar from Canterbury further discussed his findings, statistics of the various expression categories, etc.

I certainly prefer the differing expressions, because it creates a community of characters rather than a mindless army of hazy smiling zombies. When army building in particular I always enjoy giving each fig a unique expression to make them all individually unique-- plus it also provides a large set of heads to disperse back through other figs as well.

One thing I have struggled with, and I'm curious what other readers think, is the idea of swapping out the generic smileys in vintage figs from the 80's. Aside from the Kingdoms Joust knight, my entire Black Falcons faction continue to sport classic smileys, yet the rest of my castle collection features specific and appropriate expressions. I always said I'd never swap ou their heads, but lately I have been very torn. Thoughts?

[RednWhite]

There is an article on the Guardian (UK newspaper) website - see link below - with a link to download the research article.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2013/jun/12/lego-faces-getting-angrier-study

http://bartneck.de/publications/2013/agentsWithFaces/bartneckLEGOAgent.pdf

[Aanchir]

Personally, I like having diversity of facial expression, and I hardly see how that's a bad thing. Isn't learning to recognize different emotions from a person's facial expression and body language an important part of child development, and in that case, isn't having a range of expressions in fact educational?

Also, sure, there are angry expressions now (that began in 1996 or 1997 with themes like Fright Knights and Western). But there are also lots of other expressions now. Sad. Scared. Excited (back when there were no angry faces, there were also no wide-open smiles like we see on some CMFs). Nervous. Determined. Confident. Overall, I think there's no way this kind of thing is bad for kids. Even if we want to sanitize play scenarios for kids, it's ludicrous to deny the existence of emotions other than generic happiness.

[AyliffeMakit]

I heard this on BBC Radio 4 this morning, the presenter was laughing the whole way through the interview.Here's the link:

http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-22868159

[Capt.JohnPaul]

This is too funny! Especially when the title says "Legos." Seriously, why does it matter? The world isn't all happy with lolipops and made of candy. Trying to shield our kids from "anger" and "bad emotions" is just a disservice to them. The world is cruel, let them know that.

I don't think it would affect behavior anyways.

[RaincloudDustbin]

With all due respect, the writer of the article needs to 'get a life'. These sort of articles are ridiculous.

[TeufelHund]

I grew up with only happy Lego faces and personally never get grumpy but my kids have all different kinds of Lego faces and regularly go from happy to grumpy and back again so it MUST BE TRUE.

[Hey Joe]

Hey! We just got Series 10 of the CMFs and my three year-old noticed that most of them aren't very happy looking.

Is it important? That's a difficult question that I'm nowhere near qualified to answer. Could you imagine a killer in a courtroom blaming his horrible acts on the poor disposition of his Lego Minifigs? It would be called 'The Lego Defense', I guess.

There is way too much violence everywhere you look nowadays; TV, movies, the internet, newspapers, real life. It bothers me sometimes that Lego makes sets for movies that children have no business watching.

Maybe Lego should go back to the simple smiley face, stop including guns in their sets and stop making sets based on violent movies. There are lots of things we could do as a society to reduce violence,

Thanks, Joe

Edited June 13, 2013 by Hey Joe

[Peppermint_M]

There is an article on the Guardian (UK newspaper) website - see link below - with a link to download the research article.

http://www.guardian....-angrier-study

http://bartneck.de/p...kLEGOAgent.pdf

*Cracks knuckles* Well, barring being able to run a research programme on this with the target demographic of LEGO and maybe even on a multi-spectrum of cultures and circumstances (I went into the wrong field for that...) I think I can compile my own data on minifig faces and get some stats. I did pretty well in sociology, history and the sciences.

Reading the research, I can see the basic data gathering method, while perfectly acceptable, makes a lot of assumptions by using Paul Ekman's work. Human facial expression runs a lot wider than 6 basics with varied intensity. Indeed, his work is from 1975 and a lot of the soft sciences lose support and even face their own counter claims in time, especially a span of over 30 years.

Then, the old adage of "Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics" the data pool was shrunk from the 1243 heads listed on Brick Link. I do acknowledge that some are duplicates on the BL list, but 615? I haven't seen anything written in the report about removing "alien" faces from the list.

Lastly, we reach the research fail: Harry Potter was not the first theme to feature natural skin tone. LEGO Sports: Basket Ball with it's real NBA stars and Star Wars LEGO with Lando had natural skin tones in 2003. Harry Potter was still yellow figs until the 2004 wave of sets.

So, anyone interested in a full breakdown? That would take a few days just to get the basics, let alone running a questionnaire and even finding data to rate facial expressions on.

Yep, you can see these guys made a paper on an area they are far from expert in...

[BrickBob Studpants]

The thing that bothers me the most about this is the fact that they apparently completely ignored the dual-sided faces that most of the current minifigs sport these days. Do those count as friendly or grumpy or both? And I don't quite get the aim of the study; it's neither an experiment, nor an quasi-experiment or a field study, it's not even a correlational study or anything As a psychology major, I could think of plenty of experiments you could do on that matter (and I'm not really convinced that facial expressions on toys are that important for development, but again, only studies with experimental designs could shed light on this matter). Is it just me or is TLG always getting in the news for all the wrong reasons?

Edited June 13, 2013 by Lego-Freak

[TheLegoDr]

I didn't read the article, but that is true. Many heads these days do incorporate multiple expressions. And some of them aren't necessarily grumpy, but more determined. Did they include the cocky smirk of Batman to be smiling? I wouldn't consider that a smile. There are so many categories to classify things in that I don't think it can be done appropriately in such a small scale.

Either way, I like the diversity of facial expression now compared to the classic smiley all the time. Granted, I did enjoy that quite a bit too....

[Peppermint_M]

I also like the diversity of female faces, from sticking long hair on a normal smiley and the handful we had before to the two or three each CMF series is excellent!

[1974]

This is too far out. They should use their very expensive education for something worthwhile

Also, this seems to have been picked up by every major danish newspaper

[giansim]

I think the owner of the study just wants to be famous. LEGO faces depicts realities. Would you like Darth Vader to be really smiling? Read a similar article from a writer named Jon and I like his take on this. Here's the link: http://www.brickfans.com/lego-faces-the-happy-the-sad-the-angry-were-just-dumbfounded

[Peppermint_M]

Well, his area of expertise is nowhere near any sort of education or position to have notability for this subject. It sounds like the sort of idea that came from drinking night with educated people (I mean, me and my friend come up with some random stuff after a few pints. The best was Doctor Who Chess and Monopoly...) and then they ran with it. Credits on a published paper are useful to have after all!

Sensationalism really, the papers love something that makes some beloved childhood thing seem bad. On one hand to scoff at it (like we are doing) and on the other end to wring their hands and wail "Somebady think of the children!". None of them ever report the methodology used and the basic man-on-the-street can't wrap their head around it anyway. You can see above what I thought of the research...

It'll run it's course. Though my boring moments on a sunday afternoon may be taken up collating all the minifig faces and figuring some results.

[fred67]

To summarize the response to the thread title question: yes, and no.

People really do have too much time on their hands if this is the state of "research."

I'm wondering if Darth Vader is supposed to be smiling when he's half melted with his legs chopped off. It was the addition of licensed themes that really made a difference, so now you're making realistic expressions instead of smiley ones. A world of only smiles... would be like the Stepford Wives.