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Lego figures are getting angrier, claims study

Lego figures are getting angrier, claims study

Gone are the days of the happy faces -- for Legos anyway.

According to a new study out of New Zealand, Lego Minifigures are getting angrier.

(Good news, kids: You too can grow up to study Lego.)

Instead of the strictly happy faces of the '70s and '80s, many Lego figurines now boast angrier expressions, likely because of the increased in thematic Lego sets, like pirates, "Star Wars" and "Harry Potter" in which characters are intended to be in conflict with one another.

"It is our impression that the themes have been increasingly based on conflicts," write the researchers. "Often a good force is struggling with a bad one. May it be the good knights against the skeleton warriors or the space police against alien criminals. But the facial expressions are not directly matched to good and evil."

"Even the good characters suffer in their struggle and the villains can have a smug expression. In any case, the variety of faces has increased considerable."

The research team, headed by Christoph Bartneck, a robot expert from the University of Canterbury, catalogued and photographed all 3,655 Lego characters released between 1975 and 2010, then asked 264 members of Amazon's Mechanical Turk to evaluate the intensity of each character's facial expressions.

Also see: Lego under fire for 'sexist' construction worker stickers

"The emotions on display weren't mutually exclusive, too — so, for example, one head might look a five for surprise, with a two for happiness," writes Wired's Ian Steadman.

"On average, heads displayed 3.9 different emotions, which means that for a lot of the faces their emotional state is reasonably complex and ambiguous. 324 heads were judged to be dominantly happy, 192 angry, 49 sad, 28 disgusted, 23 surprised and 11 afraid."

When the researchers charted the data — and took historical trends into account — they discovered that angry Lego Minifugures have increased in proportion to the happy ones in recent years.

"The children that grow up with Lego today will remember not only smileys, but also anger and fear in the Minifigures' faces," the researchers write.

"The Lego company started in 1989 to dramatically increase the variety of facial expressions. The two most frequent expressions are happiness and anger and the proportion of happy faces is decreasing over time. We cannot help but wonder how the move from only positive faces to an increasing number of negative faces impacts how children play."

Also see: Lego line for girls hugely popular as company profits soar

"Designers of agent faces should take great care to design the expressions and to test their effect since toys plan an important role in the development of children," they conclude.

There's no additional research to link these Lego characters to angry children, so don't toss those unhappy toys just yet.

Bartneck tells BBC News that it is "hard to derive a causal relationship" between angry toys and children's behaviours.

"Playing conflict is not necessarily a bad thing. A super-duper happy world where everybody always smiles is probably not desirable either," he tells the New Zealand Herald.

The study will be presented at a conference in Japan this August, the New Zealand Herald reports.