Has Lego gotten grumpier?

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, angry, afraid, disgusted, surprised or sad.

They discovered that while in 1980, all of the figures were described as “smiley,” by 1990, only about 80 per cent of them were “smiley.” And by 2010, just 50 per cent of the figures had a smile on their little plastic faces.

The researchers are wondering how the increasingly sad, angry and unhappy faces on the Lego figurines will affect the children who play with them.

"Children's toys and how they are perceived can have a significant impact on children," said Dr. Bartneck in a media release on the university's website.

Source: Lego Minifigures Grumpier Since 1980: Study