Physiological Responses Caused by Kawaii Feeling in Watching Photos

“Kawaii” is a Japanese word that represents an emotional value; it has positive meanings, such as cute, lovable, and small. In the 21st century, the emotional value accounts for a large part of consumers’ preference. The kawaii feeling might become a key factor for creating affective and pleasurable designs. In a behavior of watching photos, we have subjective, intuitive and strong preference based on our emotional values. In this study, as a study on the kawaii feeling, we conducted experiments to examine whether physiological responses of the brain can be measured when participants get the kawaii feeing in watching photos by the event-related potential (ERP) technique. We measured electroencephalogram of the participants while they were shown kawaii photos, uninteresting photos, and mosaic images. We found that event-related potentials were elicited in response to showing the kawaii photos and the uninteresting photos, while the mosaic photos did not elicit a particular response. ERPs elicited by the kawaii photos had the positive deflection in comparison with ones evoked by the uninteresting photos after about 300-400 msec from onsets of presenting the photos. We concluded that the physiological responses of the brain can be measured when participants get kawaii feeing in watching photos.