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Use and Interpretation of Emoji in Electronic-Mediated Communication: A Survey
Abstract
Among the pictorial representations that have succeeded in electronic-mediated communication (EMC), the rise of emoji is of special interest, as they have widely spread around the world. This article reports on the results of a survey conducted among students and staff of a large Spanish university (63% women) on the use of emoticons and emoji and their interpretation. Results confirm the preference for emoji over emoticons. The responses also disclosed emerging norms on the use and functions of these pictographs in EMC: Emoji are considered more “expressive” than emoticons, and messages without these cues are judged as “rude.” Regarding the interpretation of emoji, the survey shows that it heavily relies on preexisting iconography, even if new visual conventions are developing.
... El planteamiento del trabajo pretende superar determinadas limitaciones de encuestas anteriores. Por un lado, la mayoría de los estudios de encuesta publicados hasta la fecha han centrado su atención en los emojis (Miller et al., 2016;Sampietro, 2020) o bien en los stickers (Al-Maroof et al., 2019;Chen, 2021;Carmelino y Kogawa, 2020;López Gómez, 2020) y no se ha comparado el uso de diferentes recursos visuales. Por otra parte, los escasos estudios que sí han considerado emojis y stickers al mismo tiempo se han concentrado en variables muy específicas. ...
... Sometimos las respuestas a un análisis temático a partir de categoría recurrentes en las respuestas (Braun y Clarke, 2013). Al igual que en otros estudios similares (Sampietro, 2020), en las respuestas que indicaban más de un motivo, se codificó solo el primero que se mencionaba. Como se puede ver en la Tabla 1, el análisis sugiere que los stickers se consideran más graciosos (37 personas, 33 %), expresivos (18 respuestas, 16 %), precisos a la hora de mostrar expresiones faciales o gestos (15 respuestas, 13 %), variados (14 personas, 12 %) y personalizados (11 personas, 10 %). ...
Los stickers (también llamados ‘pegatinas’) son pequeñas imágenes o animaciones que complementan las interacciones digitales en WhatsApp u otras aplicaciones de mensajería instantánea. Debido a su gran popularidad, según Konrad et al. (2020) en un futuro reemplazarán a los emojis. Este trabajo presenta los resultados de una encuesta llevada a cabo entre jóvenes (en su mayoría estudiantes de universidades españolas), con el fin de analizar el éxito de los stickers, los motivos de su popularidad y el posible cambio lingüístico al que estamos asistiendo en la interacción multimodal por mensajería instantánea. Los resultados indican que los emojis siguen siendo el recurso visual más usado en WhatsApp, pero la juventud muestra una marcada preferencia por los stickers. Estos se emplean sobre todo porque se consideran divertidos y se aprecia también la posibilidad de personalizarlos. Asimismo, los stickers recopilados para este trabajo tienen características en común con algunos géneros de memes humorísticos. Finalmente, se interpretan estos resultados como una muestra de cambio lingüístico en la comunicación digital.
... Research with emoticons suggests that (i) they can be used to convey affect and (ii) they offer contextual information that enhances interpretation of a message's meaning and emotional tone. However, because emojis have replaced emoticons in virtually all forms of text-based communication (Sampietro, 2020), this research has limited implications for our understanding of present-day digital interactions. Moreover, emoticons lack several key features of facial expressions and as such may not convey emotional signals as effectively (Coyle & Carmichael, 2019;Kralj Novak et al., 2015). ...
... For example, many emoticons are rotated sideways, which is not representative of actual faces (Lohmann et al., 2017) and can interfere with emotion signaling (Eimer & Holmes, 2002). In contrast, emojis provide richer and more realistic representations of facial expressions (Bai et al., 2019;Sampietro, 2020) and hence their influence may be qualitatively or quantitatively different. ...
Many emojis symbolize nonverbal cues that are used during face-to-face communication. Despite their popularity, few studies have examined how emojis influence digital interactions. The present study addresses this gap by measuring the impact of emojis on emotion interpretation, social attributions, and information processing. Participants read messages that are typical of social exchanges in instant text messaging (IM) accompanied by emojis that mimic negative, positive and neutral facial expressions. Sentence valence and emoji valence were paired in a fully crossed design such that verbal and nonverbal messages were either congruent or incongruent. Perceived emotional state of the sender, perceived warmth, and patterns of eye movements that reflect information processing were measured. A negativity effect was observed whereby the sender’s mood was perceived as negative when a negative emoji and/or a negative sentence were presented. Moreover, the presence of a negative emoji intensified the perceived negativity of negative sentences. Adding a positive emoji to a message increased the perceived warmth of the sender. Finally, processing speed and understanding of verbal messages was enhanced by the presence of congruent emojis. Our results therefore support the use of emojis, and in particular positive emojis, to improve communication, express feelings, and make a positive impression during socially-driven digital interactions.
... These features partially reflect the characteristics of face-to-face and written communication. For example, CMC uses the same language system as face-to-face and written communication, but with some creative use of language, such as the unconventional use of punctuation and emoticons (Bočková, 2019;Sampietro, 2020), arising from CMC. In the previous studies the explored the ...
Over the years, online communication has become increasingly popular, evolving from purely text-based formats to multifaceted media. Since the outbreak of COVID-19, live streaming of press conferences and other events on social media has dramatically increased. However, there is a lack of studies investigating the linguistic features of netizens’ online communication during live streaming of public events. Therefore, this study aimed to analyse the linguistic features of Facebook comments posted by Malaysian netizens during COVID-19 live press conferences and explore the functions of these linguistic features. In this study, a total of 1339 comments were collected during the live streaming of COVID-19 press conferences by New Straits Times on Facebook. The collected data were analysed following Crystal’s (2006) list of netspeak features. The findings revealed that Malaysian netizens used abbreviations (21.9%), emojis (13.2%), stickers (5.5%), particles (5.2%), punctuation marks (3.6%), translanguaging (3.3%), capitalisation (1.8%), and repetitions of letters (1.6%) when commenting on the COVID-19 live press conferences. The functions of these linguistic features include time-saving, emotional emphasis, identity portrayal, and others.
... A message that includes an incongruent emoji may amplify comprehension difficulties, which are inherent to written communication. Studies on the understanding of emojis show inconsistent results (Sampietro, 2020). On the one hand, the use of emojis is consistent across countries in terms of the overall semantics of the most frequent emojis (Barbieri et al., 2016;Danesi, 2017). ...
... Because computer-mediated textual communication lacks nonverbal cues that imply emotions, individuals in high-context, collectivist cultures are more likely to find graphicons useful (Yang et al., 2023b) and adopt these graphicons to more clearly express their own emotions and make their messages softer and politer (Kavanagh, 2016). Graphicon use has thus been so prevalent in these cultures (e.g., Spain, China, Japan, South Korea, etc.) during CMC that people tend to perceive textual messages without an emoticon or emoji to be rude (Sampietro, 2020). ...
This study examined recognition of the six basic emotions communicated by 72 stickers provided on Chinese and American social media. Results demonstrate that sadness, happiness, and anger are recognized more accurately than disgust, fear, and surprise. An in-group advantage exists among Chinese instead of American participants, as the latter group recognizes emotions rendered by American and Chinese stickers with similar accuracy. Women outperform men in recognizing anger and fear expressed by stickers. A dynamic advantage manifests in recognizing anger, fear, and happiness rendered by animated stickers, in relation to static stickers. Three-way interaction effects show that emotions rendered by Chinese static stickers are more easily recognized compared to American static stickers. Moreover, women and Chinese participants recognize emotions rendered by Chinese and American animated stickers at similar accuracy levels. By contrast, men and American participants deliver better performances in recognizing emotions expressed by American animated stickers than Chinese animated stickers.
... The sentiment of the emojis is computed from the sentiment of the tweets in which they occur. We engaged 83 human annotators to label over 1.6 million tweets in 13 European languages by the sentiment polarity (negative, neutral, or positive, and because emoji can express emotion more realistically than emoticons (Sampietro, 2020). Also, emojis can represent more things rather than facial expressions (Danesi, 2017). ...
Emojis and emoticons are graphic icons used primarily in computer-mediated communication with some applications in the health-care research. We conducted a scoping review to identify and classify the existing literature on emoji or emoticon usage in healthcare research. Method: Four electronic databases were searched for relevant publications dealing with emojis or emoticons. The Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for Scoping Reviews was used to guide the process. A total of 158 articles met the inclusion criteria, and among them, 66 records were identified as healthcare research. Results showed a tendency to use emoji/emoticons as tools for emotional assessment in research instruments. In general, there is an opinion/senti-ment mining tendency, using emoji/emoticons as data for understanding emotion and behavior displayed online. Some applications highlighted its potential to overcome interpretation between different types of users/individuals and to convince them to adopt healthy habits in some health interventions strategies. Emojis are far more popular than emoticons to identify online users' emotions or opinions. The creation of algorithms for analysis in addition to research that validates these codes as resources for text interpretation in different populations and scenarios will allow them to be applied in larger contexts. 53 V. 4 ⁄ N. 1 ⁄ SETEMBRO DE 2023 PÁGINAS 51 A 79 IN HEALTHCARE: A SCOPING REVIEW IDENTIFYING EXISTING RESEARCH ON EMOJI OR EMOTICONS USAGE T. LUCENA, A. NASCIMENTO, L. OLIVEIRA Identificando pesquisas existentes sobre o uso de Emojis ou Emoticons na área da saúde: uma revisão de escopo Palavras-chave Emojis Saúde Comunicação em saúde Instrumento de pesquisa Revisão de escopo Resumo Emojis e emoticons são ícones gráficos usa-dos principalmente na comunicação mediada por computador com aplicações na pesquisa na area da saúde. Essa pesquisa do tipo de revisão de escopo foi conduzida para identificar e clas-sificar a literatura existente sobre o uso do emoji e dos emoticons na pesquisa em saúde. Método: Quatro bancos de dados foram pesqui-sados em busca de publicações relevantes sobre emojis ou emoticons. Foi-se utilizado o guia da Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses para Scoping Reviews durante o processo de coleta e de tabulação dos artigos. Um total de 158 artigos atenderam aos critérios de inclusão e, dentre eles, 66 registros foram identificados como pesquisas em saúde. Os resultados mostraram uma tendência de uso de emojis/emoticons como ferramentas de avaliação emocional em instrumentos de pes-quisa. Em geral, há uma tendência de minera-ção de opinião/sentimento, utilizando emojis/ emoticons como dados para entender emo-ções e comportamentos exibidos online pelos usuários. Algumas aplicações destacaram seu potencial para superar a interpretação em di-ferentes tipos de usuários/indivíduos e conven-cê-los a adotar hábitos saudáveis em algumas estratégias de intervenções em saúde. Os emo-jis são muito mais populares do que os emoti-cons para se identificar as emoções ou opiniões dos usuários online. A criação de algoritmos de análise, além de pesquisas que validem esses códigos como recursos para interpretação de textos em diferentes populações e cenários, permitirá que sejam eles possam ser aplicados em contextos mais amplos. 54
... These once-modest symbols have come a long way, enhancing video conversations and providing a new dimension of emotional expression to digital relationships. Their extraordinary journey is illustrated by how smoothly they adapted to modern technology (Sampietro, 2020). In the digital age, emoticons have come a long way from basic text-based symbols to a universal language of emotions. ...
This study aims to thoroughly investigate the linguistic impact of emojis and emoticons in modern written communication. This work attempts to shed light on these digital symbols’ linguistic structure, social implications, and evolution through a multidisciplinary research method. A mixed-methods approach was used in the research, integrating interdisciplinary viewpoints with quantitative and qualitative analyses. A vast amount of data was gathered from various digital communication channels, such as email exchanges, messaging apps, and social media. A sizable collection of text messages with emojis and emoticons was assembled. Emotional cons and emojis were categorized using linguistic analysis, breaking down their structure into visual components and repeating patterns. Their grammatical and syntactic effects on written language were also evaluated in this investigation. The findings indicate that using emojis in writing positively correlates with emotional expressiveness. This implies that when people wish to express emotions and subtlety in their messages, they typically utilize more emoticons. They enhance digital etiquette, reduce misunderstandings, improve emotional connection, and foster cross-cultural understanding. Emoticons are a global visual language that helps people communicate, create empathy, and navigate digital communication.
... The interpretation of these symbols is often connotative rather than literal. For example, the right arrow emoji is commonly understood to represent "right", "following", and "direction" (Sampietro, 2020). In multimodal contexts such as Instagram, the top arrow emoji can fulfill two functions: representing the indeclinable adjective "top" and serving as a deictic pointing device to the image in the elliptical sentence (Siever et al., 2020, p. 197). ...
Danmu (anonymous superimposed video comments) is a popular form of communication on Chinese and Japanese video sharing sites. While previous studies primarily focused on the verbal aspects of danmu comments, there is a growing interest in exploring their multimodal features. This study investigates the unique potential of danmu comments to communicate visual meaning, interact with on-screen content, and thereby shape audience perception. Informed by a social semiotic approach to multimodality and relevant pragmatic theories, the study analyzed 50 screenshots of visually significant danmu comments to understand the resources used by commenters to craft visual comments and the relationship between these comments and the screen. Our findings revealed that four key resources were utilized to create visual comments: arrows, kaomoji, context-specific special characters and symbols, and ASCII art. Additionally, five types of relationships were identified between visual danmu comments and the screen, including deictic, emphasizing, complementing, extending, and independent. This study provides an up-to-date examination of the possibilities for visual expression in textual communication and extends previous research on semiotic resources in social media. It also discusses the role of danmu visual play as internet memes and the emergence of danmu visual grammar.
... First, directly descended from emoticons, face emojis have been studied as a successor to emoticons (Kaye et al. 2017;Li et al. 2018). Second, face emojis mostly replace emoticons in text-based CMC because face emojis better represent facial behaviors, leading to conveying emotional signals more effectively (Coyle and Carmichael 2019;Kralj Novak et al. 2015;Sampietro 2020). Consequently, by incorporating emoticons in face emojis, we use face emojis and non-face emojis differently: the former refers to only facial expressions, including emoticons; the latter points out all emojis except face emojis. ...
Communication is a purposeful process, especially during disasters, when emergency management officials and citizen journalists attempt to disseminate relevant information to as many affected people as possible. X (previously Twitter), a popular computer-mediated communication (CMC) platform, has become an essential resource for disaster information given its ability to facilitate real-time communication. Past studies on disasters have mainly concentrated on the verbal-linguistic conventions of words and hashtags as the means to convey disaster-related information. Little attention has been given to non-verbal linguistic cues, such as emojis. In this study, we investigate the use of emojis in disaster communication on X by using uncertainty reduction theory as the theoretical framework. We measured information uncertainty in individual tweets and assessed whether information conveyed in external URLs mitigated such uncertainty. We also examined how emojis affect information uncertainty and information dissemination. The statistical results from analyzing tweets related to the 2018 California Camp Fire disaster show that information uncertainty has a negative impact on information dissemination, and the negative impact was amplified when emojis depicted items and objects instead of facial expressions. Conversely, external URLs reduced the negative impact. This study sheds light on the influence of emojis on the dissemination of disaster information on X and provides insights for both academia and emergency management practitioners in using CMC platforms.
... We advise corporations to develop human-like visuals suitable for their brand personas within social media to intensify the consumers' perception of brand social presence on a brand-owned social media platform. In fact, one recent survey suggested that individuals are prone to use visual cues, such as emojis and emoticons, to satisfy different motivations (Sampietro, 2020). ...
Corporations are personifying their brands, particularly when communicating via social media. Applying the theoretical underpinnings of brand social presence and personification, this experimental study investigates whether and how personified brand visuals increase consumer engagement. Results find that personified visuals are more effective in engaging consumers than non-personified visuals, and this effect is mediated by the social presence consumers perceive from brands that further increases consumer-brand connections. The study highlights that brand personas matter in visual communication in garnering consumer engagement on social media, and this event occurs indirectly through the perceptions that brands are socially present and connected as human-like communicators. The findings also highlight the direct effect of personified visuals on consumer engagement. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.
... A recent survey of university students indicated that the overwhelming majority used emojis (91%), most commonly facial expressions, followed by hand gestures, objects, and symbols. They also heavily preferred emojis over emoticons (86%), citing their visual appeal, expressiveness, and ease of use [6]. The use of an image such as an emoji to represent concepts is not a new one. ...
Background
Emoticons and emojis have become staple additions to modern-day communication. These graphical icons are now embedded in daily society through the various forms of popular social media and through users’ personal electronic conversations. With ever-increasing use and inclusivity, exploration of the possible health care and dermatology applications of these tools is imperative.
Objective
The goal of this narrative review was to provide and evaluate an up-to-date literature survey examining the utility of emoticons and emojis in medicine. Special attention was paid to their existing and potential uses in the field of dermatology, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Methods
A PubMed search of peer-reviewed publications was performed in mid-2021 to collect articles with emoticon or emoji keywords in combination with other health care–relevant or dermatology-relevant keywords. Screening of publications and described studies was performed by the authors with education and research experience in health care, dermatology, social media, and electronic communication trends. Selected articles were grouped based on common subjects for qualitative analysis and presentation for in-depth discussion.
Results
From this extensive search, researchers were able to identify a wide variety of publications detailing the use of emoticons and emojis in general health care, pediatric health care, public health, and dermatology. Key subject areas that emerged from the investigation included the ability of emoticons and emojis to improve communication within pediatric health care, enhance mood and psychological assessment or mental health screening in adults, develop interventions to improve patient medication adherence, complement novel means of public health and COVID-19 surveillance, and bolster dermatology-specific applications.
Conclusions
This review illuminated the repurposing of emojis and emoticons for a myriad of advantageous functions in health care and public health, with applications studied in many populations and situations. Dermatology-specific uses were relatively sparse in the literature, highlighting potential opportunities for growth in future studies and practices. The importance of diversity and inclusivity has extended to emojis, with the recent introduction of skin color customization and new emojis better representing the comprehensive spectrum of users’ experiences. A continuously evolving and technology-driven population creates a unique niche for emoticons and emojis to ease worldwide communication and understanding, transcending the barriers of age, language, and background. We encourage future studies and innovations to better understand and expand their utility.
... Lastly, Ciudadanos employed angry facial expressions and the orange fruit, as orange is their party color. These uses are coherent with other findings that suggest that the use of emojis is mainly pragmatic and dependent on the communication context (Sampietro, 2020). ...
Facebook's advertising platform provides political parties with an electoral tool that enables them to reach an extremely detailed audience. Unlike television, the sponsored content on Facebook is seen only by the targeted users. This opacity was an obstacle to political communications research until Facebook released advertiser-sponsored content in 2018. The company's new transparent policy included sharing metadata related to the cost and number of impressions the ads received. This research studies the content sponsored on Facebook by the five main national political parties in Spain during the two General Elections held in 2019. The research corpus consists of 14,684 Facebook ads. An extraction algorithm detected the key terms in the text-based messages conveyed in the ad. The prominence of these topics was estimated from the aggregate number of impressions accumulated by each term. Different content patterns were assessed following three categories: user mobilization, candidate presence, and ideological issues. PSOE and PP positioned themselves more toward calls to action. Podemos had the greater number of issues related to policy among the most salient topics in its advertising. Ciudadanos' strategy focused more on its candidate and mobilization. Vox sponsored few Facebook ads, and they barely included policy issues. Spain was a highly prominent term in all parties' campaigns. Ciudadanos shared the middle ground on the ideological axis: they promoted social issues more aligned with left-wing parties as well as economic topics usually advocated by the right-wing. Overall, our results point to a greater emphasis on candidates rather than issues.
... Moreover, it is a topic of interest to study how people from the same speech community perceive the meaning of emojis and apply them in use. Researchers used a survey and questionaries in previous studies to ask for the user experience and understanding [22], [23]. There is little research on the way that users learn to use emojis in practice. ...
In most cultures, the Slightly Smiling Face (smiley) icon indicates friendliness and niceness. However, this SSF symbol in emoji may also indicate a negative meaning of sarcasm and irony to some Chinese social media users. This research analyses the sentiment reflected in the use of the SSF emoji as used by Chinese users on Twitter and applies quantitative methods to investigate the linguistic and social constraints of the SSF emoji's negative variable from 2016 to 2020. Results show that positive or negative emotional expression of SSF emoji is highly dependent on the content of the sentence and its context. Therefore, the SSF emoji has no semantic value as a word for expressing emotions but acts as an emotive anaphora or a modal particle. Simplified Chinese users from mainland China use the SSF emoji with a negative sense more than Traditional Chinese users from Taiwan. These differences may reflect the users’ media preference and cultural identification through the use of emoji, a global language for the digital age. Most Chinese users use a single SSF emoji, which can convey either emotion, at the end of the sentence, but when the SSF emoji is used in a repetitive manner, it is more likely to indicate a sarcastic emotion. Both variables, (single use / repetition) and Chinese types (Simplified / Traditional), significantly correlate with the use of the negative variant of the SSF emoji (p < 0.05). The change in the meaning of the SSF emoji from the expression of positive to negative sentiment demonstrates that emojis may change through time in ways similar to other forms of language.
... The world around is becoming increasingly digitised, and this process is if anything accelerating. Emoji are becoming ubiquitous in interpersonal electronic communication-digital interpersonal communication is more likely to involve an exchange of text + emoji as opposed to text + emoticon (e.g., Boutet et al., 2021;Sampietro, 2020). Interpersonal communication relies upon verbal and non-verbal information, and there is extant evidence to suggest that non-verbal information shapes social perceptions (e.g., Frith & Frith, 1999;Willis & Todorov, 2006). ...
We investigated ASD-diagnosed adults’ and neurotypical (NT) controls’ processing of emoji and emoji influence on the emotionality of otherwise-neutral sentences. Study 1 participants categorised emoji representing the six basic emotions using a fixed-set of emotional adjectives. Results showed that ASD-diagnosed participants’ classifications of fearful, sad, and surprised emoji were more diverse and less ‘typical’ than NT controls’ responses. Study 2 participants read emotionally-neutral sentences; half paired with sentence-final happy emoji, half with sad emoji. Participants rated sentence + emoji stimuli for emotional valence. ASD-diagnosed and NT participants rated sentences + happy emoji as equally-positive, however, ASD-diagnosed participants rated sentences + sad emoji as more-negative than NT participants. We must acknowledge differential perceptions and effects of emoji, and emoji-text inter-relationships, when working with neurodiverse stakeholders.
... En este perfil de Twitter, al no poder añadir el logotipo dentro de la caja de texto en la que se teclea la información de perfil, se incluyen tres emojis de los colores del equipo. La dificultad para personalizar gráficamente los mensajes en redes sociales añadiendo con rapidez un toque de color puede ser uno de los posibles motivos del gran éxito de los emojis (Sampietro, 2020 ...
La imagen del corazón aparece constantemente en nuestro día a día: la encontramos en la decoración de multitud de objetos cotidianos, en la ropa, en las pintadas callejeras, en logotipos y escaparates, y es omnipresente en el mundo digital, donde el comando “me gusta” tiene a menudo forma de corazón. El presente trabajo tiene el objetivo de identificar las razones de esta predilección por la imagen cardíaca y las funciones que desempeña su representación. Para ello, hemos llevado a cabo un estudio de paisaje lingüístico y semiótico, recopilando y analizando un amplio corpus de imágenes de corazones, recogido en el espacio urbano y en internet. El análisis muestra que la imagen estudiada desempeña todas las funciones del lenguaje de Jakobson (1984); los principales contextos de uso del corazón son la expresión del sentimiento amoroso, la muestra de apreciación y la manifestación de agradecimiento. Comentamos en las conclusiones el “trasvase” de usos del corazón de la calle a la pantalla y viceversa.
ABSTRACT:
The image of the heart regularly appears in our daily lives: it decorates multiple everyday objects, such as clothing, logos, shop windows, and it appears on graffiti. Additionally, it is ubiquitous in the digital world, as the "like" button is often in the shape of a heart. The aim of this paper is to identify the reasons why the image of the heart is so widespread, and the functions performed by its representation. In order to do so, we carried out a linguistic and semiotic landscape study, by analysing a large corpus of images of hearts, collected in the urban landscape and on the Internet. The results show that the hearts found in the two corpora perform all language functions identified by Jakobson (1984); the main contexts of use of the heart are the expression of love, appreciation, and gratitude. Finally, we comment on the "transfer" of functions of the heart from street to screen and vice versa.
... When the data were collected, WhatsApp messages without emojis would appear in plain text, as it was not possible to customize the font, colour or size of the words typed. One of the reasons for the appeal of emojis, in fact, is their colour (Sampietro 2020). More than 700 emojis were available at the time of the compilation of the corpus. ...
Emojis are little pictographs commonly added to electronic messages on several social media platforms. Besides being considered as a way to express emotions in electronically-mediated communication (EMC), similarly to ASCII emoticons, emojis are strictly involved in the performance of humour in everyday digital conversation. Drawing on a corpus of casual WhatsApp dyadic chats, this paper analyses the contribution of emojis to humour in conversation. Results show that these pictographs not only help to signal the opening and closing of the play frame, but also to respond to humour, graphically reproducing laughter. For these purposes, the most common emojis employed by WhatsApp users are the popular yellow smiling and laughing faces. Nevertheless, other pictographs are also involved in electronic humour, as less common emojis can be used in playful ways by themselves.
This study examines the perceptions and use of emojis in digital communication among English majors in private in Bangladesh. There has been limited study on Bangladeshi private university students regarding emoji usage. This study thus investigates the impact of emojis on the development of language and communication norms, employing socio-linguistic principles and theories of digital communication. The research collected data from a cohort of one hundred and thirty-three undergraduate students attending three private universities in Dhaka, Bangladesh. The data was obtained through a quantitative methodology that involved the use of questionnaires and qualitative interviews. The results indicate a more profound comprehension of emoji interpretation and usage within the cultural and educational contexts of Bangladesh. The study contributes to sociolinguistics and digital communication studies, offering practical implications for educators, policymakers, and communication professionals in Bangladesh and beyond.
This study examines the perceptions and use of emojis in digital communication among English majors in private in Bangladesh. There has been limited study on Bangladeshi private university students regarding emoji usage. This study thus investigates the impact of emojis on the development of language and communication norms, employing socio-linguistic principles and theories of digital communication. The research collected data from a cohort of one hundred and thirty-three undergraduate students attending three private universities in Dhaka, Bangladesh. The data was obtained through a quantitative methodology that involved the use of questionnaires and qualitative interviews. The results indicate a more profound comprehension of emoji interpretation and usage within the cultural and educational contexts of Bangladesh. The study contributes to sociolinguistics and digital communication studies, offering practical implications for educators, policymakers, and communication professionals in Bangladesh and beyond.
This paper explores the dynamic role of emojis in text-based communication among Nigerian youths and the potential implications for miscommunication. Emojis have become integral to contemporary digital conversations, offering users a visual means of expressing emotions, tone, and context within the constraints of text-based interactions. In the context of Nigeria, a country with a diverse linguistic landscape and a youthful population heavily engaged in online communication, understanding the impact of emojis on interpersonal exchanges becomes particularly pertinent. This paper examines the prevalence and patterns of emoji usage among Nigerian youths across various digital platforms. It investigates the cultural nuances and interpretations associated with emojis within the Nigerian context, considering factors such as regional differences, linguistic diversity, and socio-cultural influences. Furthermore, the study examines instances where emojis may contribute to miscommunication or misunderstanding, potentially exacerbating conflicts or hindering effective communication. Through a comprehensive review of existing literature, online discourse analysis, and case studies, this research aims to shed light on the ways in which emojis influence the interpretation of textual messages and the potential challenges they pose to clear and accurate communication. The study concludes that as digital communication continues to be a primary mode of interaction, it is essential for users to recognize the potential for misinterpretation, prompting the need for increased emoji literacy and awareness.
Emojis are prevalent in text-based communication, but the factors that influence our use and preference for emojis remains unclear. This study investigated how emoji use and preference could be explained by three factors; mental health, personality and prosocial behaviour. A questionnaire consisting of five measures was completed by 222 participants and both Pearson correlations and multiple regressions were conducted on the data. The results showed prosocial behaviour significantly related to frequency, attitudes and motivations towards emoji use as well as to positive emoji preference. Agreeableness related to the frequency of emoji use. Extraversion related to both positive and negative emoji preference while conscientiousness and emotional stability significantly related to negative emoji preference only. General mental health significantly related to negative emoji preference. The regressions found all of the factors identified in the correlations predicted emoji use and preference with the exception of extraversion. Further research is needed to explore how the impact of the emotions depicted by emojis on these factors and to investigate how emojis are used by people with specific mental health conditions.
This study examines the communicative functions of emojis as used by Saudi females aged between (35-55) in twenty-five female-only WhatsApp groups’ instant messages. These groups are chosen according to five different social purposes for which the group is created: sisterhood-related, close friendship-related, relatives-related, religion-related, and workplace-related. The data has been collected through screenshots of WhatsApp conversations naturally occurring between the females in these groups. The method used for checking the types of emojis and their frequencies is based on computer-mediated discourse analysis (CMDA) of ‘coding and counting’ (Herring 2004). All the different emojis were coded and counted and then were put to qualitative analysis on theories and methods of interactional sociolinguistics (IS) such as (Gumperz 1982; Dressner and Herring 2010). Results show that emojis have been used to express various kinds of emotions such as happiness, sadness, longing for old days, etc. Furthermore, they have been used to express different communicative functions of what Gumperz (1982) refers to as ‘contextualization cues’ such as congratulation on happy occasions, agreeing on others’ comments, compliments, sharing information with others, gratitude, sending prayers, reminding the members of religious tasks, laughing, arguing, etc. The results also prove that emojis are context-dependent and are used to help users to approximate real daily face-to-face situations to others and to facilitate the different expressed emotions and communicative functions to receivers (Dressner and Herring 2010; Evans 2017).
The Build-A-Bot online platform has been developed with the goal to enable active participatory design and broaden the participation in social robot design. The platform is hosted on a webpage to make robot design widely available. Active participatory design is enabled by giving the user the maximum amount of creative freedom in creating their own designs. The platform uses a form of gamification that challenges the user to build robot designs that emulate an experience or agency capability. The overall goal is to create a comprehensive set of robot designs that are related to such an attribute. This data then will allow us to research robot mind perception using Machine Learning and neuroscience methods in the future. This work focuses on the development of the online Build-A-Bot platform and the methodology implemented on the platform.
Recently, alternatives to self-report questionnaire that uses words to measure emotional responses to foods have appeared, with a number of published studies that use emoji. Here, we describe how to develop and implement these emoji questionnaires, taking into account specific adjustments needed in case the questionnaires are to be used with specific age groups (e.g., children, adolescents, older people).Key wordsEmojiQuestionnairesEmotionsAdultsChildrenCATARATA
Emoji increasingly feature alongside written language in interpersonal communication. Boutet et al. (2021) showed that negative-face emoji led to a negativity effect on perceptions of message tone and senders' mood. We extended their design, considering the role of non-face emoji and the impact of text content and emoji on message clarity. We utilised a 3 (sentence valence: negative, neutral, positive) × 5 (emoji type: no emoji, negative face, neutral face, positive face, object emoji) quasi-experimental design and online survey method. Sixty participants each processed 60 stimuli counterbalanced across conditions, rating messages' emotional tone and clarity, and senders’ warmth and emotional state. Cumulative link mixed models were used to analyse responses. We found that sentence valence and emoji type interact, influencing message emotionality and clarity, and perceived sender warmth and state. The congruency of text and emoji was particularly important; results showed that incongruent emoji detracted from message clarity vs. no emoji (or congruent emoji). Congruent emoji typically amplified emotional perceptions of messages and senders. Object emoji were most influential when text was either neutral or positive. Results were consistent with models such as the EASI framework (Van Kleef, 2009), and suggest that compositionality extends to representations of text + emoji.
La taquinerie, une forme de communication courante qui implique l’ambiguïté, est rendue plus ambiguë par la messagerie texte car les marqueurs de communication qui signalent l’intention sont restreints par rapport à l’interaction en face à face. Bien que la messagerie texte rende l’ambiguïté de la taquinerie plus importante, certains éléments de la communication par messages textes ont néanmoins un impact sur l’interprétation des messages textes de taquinerie, notamment les caractéristiques du message (étude 1 : le sigle « lol » et l’emoji « clin d’œil avec la langue »), le contexte social (étude 2 : la relation expéditeur-destinataire) et la sensibilité au rejet d’une personne (étude 1 et étude 2). Dans l’étude 1, les effets des caractéristiques des messages ont été examinés à l’aide du modèle de carré latin avec un échantillon de N = 490 participants étudiants de premier cycle. Dans l’étude 2, les effets du contexte social ont été examinés à l’aide du modèle de contrebalancement classique avec un échantillon de N = 394 étudiants de premier cycle. L’utilisation d’emoji et des relations plus étroites ont entraîné des évaluations plus positives des messages de taquinerie, mais le sigle « lol » n’a pas contribué à des évaluations plus positives de la taquinerie. Dans les deux études, la sensibilité au rejet était liée à une évaluation plus négative des messages textes ambigus.
The use of emoji/emoticon is increasingly popular across the world in different platforms of online communication and they are commonly used in modern text communication as well. According to analyzed data, Iranian internet users would rather use emojis than emoticons due to some reasons, namely, expressive, practical and aesthetic reasons. This study is set forth to explore whether the use of emoji bears any relationship to the gender and age among Iranian internet users. The result of statistical analysis has patently revealed that women tend to use emoji (both positive and negative) more than men; correspondingly, they are considered more emotional with respect to sentiment analysis. Moreover, the result has demonstrated that women openly express their emotions and love with emojis in social media similar to real life. Concerning age, collected data display that there is an inverse relationship between the age and the frequency of emoji use. In other words, the frequency of the emoji use would be substantially declined by growing older. This study can provide a base for future research most notably those pertaining to machine learning, natural language processing and designing models for predicting online demographical information.
Les émoticônes sont souvent utilisées dans les environnements numériques pour transmettre des émotions. Bien qu’une grande diversité d’émoticônes existe, on sait peu de choses sur la façon dont elles transmettent des émotions par rapport à d’autres modes d’expression, et peu d’études se sont intéressées à leur utilisation dans un contexte scolaire. Dans cette thèse, quatre études (N = 291) ont été réalisées pour concevoir de « nouvelles » émoticônes représentant de manière non ambigüe les six émotions de base, trois études (N = 957) ont cherché à comparer la qualité de reconnaissance des émotions à partir de ces « nouvelles » émoticônes par rapport à d’autres modes d’expression, et notamment les expressions faciales. Une dernière étude a examiné la façon dont ces émoticônes sont utilisées sur une webradio par des collégiens (N = 204). Les résultats ont montré que les « nouvelles » émoticônes véhiculent les émotions plus efficacement et plus intensément que les expressions faciales et les émoticônes de Facebook et iOS. Cette meilleure reconnaissance est principalement due aux émotions négatives de dégoût et de tristesse. L’implémentation de ces « nouvelles » émoticônes sur la Wikiradio© Saooti a permis d’étudier leurs usages en contexte scolaire. Les résultats ont montré que, indépendamment du genre des élèves, l’utilisation de l’émoticône véhiculant la joie a été privilégiée pour exprimer les émotions à l’égard des émissions réalisées par des pairs. Ces résultats suggèrent la nécessité de concevoir des émoticônes spécifiques pour transmettre de manière non ambigüe des émotions dans les environnements numériques et étudier leurs effets sur les comportements.
RESUMEN El sistema de mensajería WhatsApp es una muestra más de lenguaje virtual, instantáneo, dentro de la categoría de lo hablado escrito (Oesterreicher, 1996), pensado para teléfonos móviles inteligentes. Es un sistema que comparte muchas de las peculiaridades de otras técnicas de comunicación electrónicas (las más cer-canas, el Messenger y el SMS, como se estudia en este artículo) pero que aporta al conjunto otros elementos novedosos (el código iconográfico emoji, por ejem-plo). El WhatsApp es una aplicación con sus grandes ventajas comunicativas, tec-nológicas y económicas pero también con sus defectos (no permite llamadas usando la tarifa de datos, por ejemplo; no usa cifrado, con lo que los mensajes pue-den ser interceptados), lo que está derivando en la rápida aparición de vías alter-nativas y con nuevas prestaciones (Skype para móvil, Line, Nimbuzz, Palringo, Viber, Tango, Spotbros, Telegram, etc.), que no tardarán en dejar obsoleto este breve estudio sobre un nuevo discurso electrónico. Aun así, y en definitiva, el WhatsApp nos interesa como lingüistas por haberse convertido en un testimonio más "de la capacidad de adaptación y colonización de la competencia comuni-cativa humana en cualquier medio" (Blanco, 2002: 79).
ABSTRACT WhatsApp messaging system is another example of virtual language, instant, within the category of written spoken (Oesterreicher, 1996), designed for intelligent mobile phones. It is a system that shares many of the features of other electronic communication techniques (the closest, the Messenger and SMS, as discussed in this article) but it brings to the whole other novel elements (the iconographic code emoji, for example). The WhatsApp is an application with its great communicative, technological and economic advantages but also with its defects (does not allow calls using the data rate, for example, does not use encryption, so that messages can be intercepted), which is leading in the fast emergence of alternative routes and new services (Skype mobile, Line, Nimbuzz, Palringo, Viber, Tango, Spotbros, Telegram, etc.), which will soon get this brief study out of date on a new electronic discourse. Even so, in conclusion, WhatsApp interests us as linguists for having become a further testimony “of ability of adaptability and colonization of human communicative competence in any medium” (Blanco, 2002: 79).
En este trabajo ofrecemos una aproximación transversal al fenómeno de los emojis, pequeños pictogramas en color que se utilizan profusamente en mensajes de texto, redes sociales y páginas webs. En concreto, se presentan dos reflexiones, que podrían ser puntos de partida para sendas actividades didácticas destinadas a alumnos de grado o posgrado de lingüística, comunicación audiovisual o
periodismo, sobre el uso de los emojis fuera de su contexto habitual —la comunicación mediada por ordenador. En el primer caso analizamos un corpus de noticias de periódico en las que se mencionan los emojis para reflexionar sobre las razones de la
superioridad de la escritura normativa en nuestra cultura. En la segunda propuesta se analizan tres campañas publicitarias que explotan estos pictogramas para dirigirse a jóvenes consumidores. Al analizar de forma crítica un elemento tan cotidiano de la comunicación digital, esta aproximación transversal a los emojis se plantea como una actividad creativa y muy motivadora para el alumnado.
In recent years, advertisers have increasingly been using emoji in their promotional communications. However, little is known about how consumers might react to the use of emoji in advertisements. In this paper, we examine the effect of including emoji in advertisements on consumers' purchase intentions. Two empirical investigations (a laboratory experiment and an online study) provide convergent evidence that the presence of emoji leads consumers to experience higher positive affect, which in turn, leads to higher purchase intentions. We also examined the moderating influence of product type (utilitarian vs. hedonic) on the emoji ➔ positive affect ➔ purchase intentions link, finding that emoji are only effective for promoting hedonic products. The findings of our work offer theoretical and managerial implications with respect to why and when emoji are likely to make advertisements more effective.
We present a theoretical framework bearing on the evolution of written communication. We analyze writing as a special kind of graphic code. Like languages, graphic codes consist of stable, conventional mappings between symbols and meanings, but (unlike spoken or signed languages) their symbols consist of enduring images. This gives them the unique capacity to transmit information in one go across time and space. Yet this capacity usually remains quite unexploited, because most graphic codes are insufficiently informative. They may only be used for mnemonic purposes or as props for oral communication in real‐time encounters. Writing systems, unlike other graphic codes, work by encoding a natural language. This allows them to support asynchronous communication in a more powerful and versatile way than any other graphic code. Yet, writing systems will not automatically unlock the capacity to communicate asynchronously. We argue that this capacity is a rarity in non‐literate societies, and not so frequent even in literate ones. Asynchronous communication is intrinsically inefficient because asynchrony constrains the amount of information that the interlocutors share and limits possibilities for repair. This would explain why synchronous, face‐to‐face communication always fosters the development of sophisticated codes (natural languages), but similar codes for asynchronous communication evolve with more difficulties. It also implies that writing cannot have evolved, at first, for supporting asynchronous communication.
Social media require a marketing rhetoric that embraces emerging language use and shifting communication norms. Emojis have become quintessential elements of social media communication; yet, their role in supporting persuasion attempts has not been systematically analysed. Drawing on general rhetoric literature, this paper dissects, portrays and labels social media influencers’ persuasive attempts to initiate engagement through emojis. The focus on influencers is justified because of their dual roles as marketers and active social media users. 600 Weibo posts by the top 200 Weibo influencers were collected to develop a taxonomy of emoji-based verbal moves aimed at encouraging responses in followers. The resulting taxonomy demonstrates that emoji use by social media influencers is complex and strategic and serves multiple persuasive and communicative purposes.
In "Making Comics: Storytelling Secrets of Comics, Manga and Graphic Novels" (2006), Scott McCloud proposes that the use of specific drawing techniques will enable viewers to reliably deduce different degrees of intensity of the six basic emotions from facial expressions in comics. Furthermore, he suggests that an accomplished comics artist can combine the components of facial expressions conveying the basic emotions to produce complex expressions, many of which are supposedly distinct and recognizable enough to be named. This paper presents an empirical investigation and assessment of the validity of these claims, based on the results obtained from three questionnaires. Each of the questionnaires deals with one of the aspects of McCloud’s proposal: face expression intensity, labelling, and compositionality. The data show that the tasks at hand were much more difficult than would have been expected on the basis of McCloud’s proposal, with the intensity matching task being the most successful of the three.
Undergraduate students, who are digital native, are keen on using emoji (smileys and ideograms) frequently to express themselves emotionally in their digital communication such as WhatsApp Messenger. Nevertheless, sometimes, they got into misunderstanding due to the different emoji's interpretation between the sender and the recipient. Research investigating emoji is still relatively new and this study discusses the diverse interpretations of WhatsApp emoji specifically the smileys among Malaysian undergraduates in a public university. This study attempted to investigate 210 undergraduates' interpretations of 75 smiley (face-like) meanings in WhatsApp Messenger. The respondents were asked to give feedback in self-administrated survey questionnaire to gather information on their interpretation of the smileys used in WhatsApp. A descriptive analysis was conducted on the students' interpretations and the findings disclosed that although the students interpreted a few smileys correctly, they did not know the intended meaning of most of the smileys correctly. The results of this study suggested that the students should know the meaning of the smiley/ emoji used in their digital conversation to able to understand its intended use and to avoid miscommunication in their digital communication. For WhatsApp users, the findings will be beneficial to emphasize the need to understand the emoji's intended meaning for future tolerant and wiser use. © 2017, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia Press. All rights reserved.
Choosing the right emoji to visually complement or condense the meaning of a message has become part of our daily life. Emojis are pictures, which are naturally combined with plain text, thus creating a new form of language. These pictures are the same independently of where we live, but they can be interpreted and used in different ways. In this paper we compare the meaning and the usage of emojis across different languages. Our results suggest that the overall semantics of the subset of the emojis we studied is preserved across all the languages we analysed. However, some emojis are interpreted in a different way from language to language, and this could be related to socio-geographical differences.
As multimedia computing becomes the order of the day, so there is a greater need to understand and to come to terms with the problems of visual presentation. This paper deals with iconic languages as a means of communicating ideas and concepts without words. Two example systems, developed respectively at the universities of Exeter and Brighton, are described. Both embody basic principles of the iconic communication which,, though not unique to learning technology, is forming an increasingly important part of user-interfaces, including those in the area computer-assisted learning.
Emoji provide a way to express nonverbal conversational cues in computer-mediated communication. However, people need to share the same understanding of what each emoji symbolises, otherwise communication can breakdown. We surveyed 436 people about their use of emoji and ran an interactive study using a two-dimensional emotion space to investigate (1) the variation in people's interpretation of emoji and (2) their interpretation of corresponding Android and iOS emoji. Our results show variations between people's ratings within and across platforms. We outline our solution to reduce misunderstandings that arise from different interpretations of emoji.
The blog site of the Oxford Dictionaries features a post dated November 16 2015, which announces that, “for the first time ever”, their “Word of the Year” is not a word, but a pictograph: the “Face with Tears of Joy” emoji. The term emoji, which is a loanword from Japanese, identifies “a small digital image or icon used to express an idea or emotion in electronic communication” (OED 2015). The sign was chosen since it is the item that “best reflected the ethos, mood, and preoccupations of 2015”. Indeed, the Oxford Dictionaries’ President, Caspar Grathwohl declared that emojis are “an increasingly rich form of communication that transcends linguistic borders” and reflects the “playfulness and intimacy” of global digital culture. Adopting a socio-semiotic multimodal approach, the present paper aims at decoding the many semantic and semiotic layers of the 2015 “Word of the Year”, with a special focus on the context of cultures out of which it originates. More in detail, the author will focus on the concept of translation as “transduction”, that is the movement of meaning across sign systems (Kress 1997), in order to map the history of this ‘pictographic word’ from language to language, from culture to culture, from niche discursive communities to the global scenario. Indeed, the author maintains that this ‘pictographic word’ is to be seen as a marker of the mashing up of Japanese and American cultures in the discursive practices of geek communities, now gone mainstream thanks to the spreading of digital discourse.
Emoji are commonly used in modern text communication. However, as graphics with nuanced details, emoji may be open to interpretation. Emoji also render differently on different viewing platforms (e.g., Apple's iPhone vs. Google's Nexus phone), potentially leading to communication errors. We explore whether emoji renderings or differences across platforms give rise to diverse interpretations of emoji. Through an online survey, we solicit people's interpretations of a sample of the most popular emoji characters, each rendered for multiple platforms. Both in terms of sentiment and semantics, we analyze the variance in interpretation of the emoji, quantifying which emoji are most (and least) likely to be misinterpreted. In cases in which participants rated the same emoji rendering, they disagreed on whether the sentiment was positive, neutral, or negative 25% of the time. When considering renderings across platforms, these disagreements only increase. Overall, we find significant potential for miscommunication, both for individual emoji renderings and for different emoji renderings across platforms.
Emoticons are schematic facial expressions or little pictographs, which are added to electronic messages. Following a complete review of the literature on Computer-Mediated Communication and emoticons, this dissertation analyses the history of emoticons, their typologies and discusses their current spread. The empirical part of this doctoral work is based on an exploratory survey and the analysis of a corpus. The survey was answered by a convenience sample of 226 people. It considered some understudied aspects in research on emoticons, as the settings in which emoticons are mostly used, the most recurring contexts in which they appear and the possible reasons for the current success of emoji. The survey also investigated the agreement of respondents regarding the meaning they would attribute to a set of 19 graphical emoticons, in order to assess the interpretation of these pictographs and the emergence of a conventional meanings. The corpus is composed by a sample of WhatsApp chats. This is a popular instant messaging application for smartphones, which is really popular in Spain. The methodology for the corpus analysis integrates two different approaches: on one hand, Computer-Mediated Discourse Analysis (Herring, 2004), consisting in applying linguistic methods to online corpora, and social semiotics (Kress & Van Leeuwen, 2006), a recent perspective that analyses human communication considering non-linguistic materials, too (Adami, 2016; Jewitt, 2009). Results confirm the popularity of emoji, the preference for the traditional yellow faces and a clear preference for the use of emoticons in informal registers and positive contexts. From an intersemiotic point of view, the relationship between text and images is widely metonymic. The functions of emoticons may be varied (politeness, enhancement of the message, signaling informality, replacing words, managing turn-taking, etc.). Their use seldom provoke misunderstandings. Moreover, the dissertation considered social and cultural aspects related to the use and spread of emoticons, WhatApp and the current digital culture.
CMC research presents emoticons as visual representations of writers' emotions. We argue that the emoticons in authentic workplace e-mails do not primarily indicate writers' emotions. Rather, they provide information about how an utterance is supposed to be interpreted. We show that emoticons function as contextualization cues, which serve to organize interpersonal relations in written interaction. They serve 3 communicative functions. First, when following signatures, emoticons function as markers of a positive attitude. Second, when following utterances that are intended to be interpreted as humorous, they are joke/irony markers. Third, they are hedges: when following expressive speech acts (such as thanks, greetings, etc.) they function as strengtheners and when following directives (such as requests, corrections, etc.) they function as softeners.
The authors address 2 questions about embarrassment. First, Is embarrassment a distinct emotion? The evidence indicates that the antecedents, experience, and display of embarrassment, and to a limited extent its autonomic physiology, are distinct from shame, guilt, and amusement and share the dynamic, temporal characteristics of emotion. Second, What are the theoretical accounts of embarrassment? Three accounts focus on the causes of embarrassment, positioning that it follows the loss of self-esteem, concern for others' evaluations, or absence of scripts to guide interactions. A fourth account focuses on the effects of the remedial actions of embarrassment, which correct preceding transgressions. A fifth account focuses on the functional parallels between embarrassment and nonhuman appeasement. The discussion focuses on unanswered questions about embarrassment.
This chapter analyses anger in two Asterix comics albums and two Asterix animated films. This will on the one hand yield, enrich, and qualify Forceville's (2005a) earlier findings on the visual representation of the Idealized Cognitive Model of anger in the Asterix album La Zizanie and on the other hand enable insights into medium-specific representations of the ICM of anger. In investigating the structural part of the emotion metaphors, handbooks for comics and animated films will be taken into account as well, thus allowing for comparisons between theories developed in metaphor scholarship and the practices of animation artists. The methodological framework constructed for the analysis in this paper is applicable to (a) other emotions and (b) other pictorial manifestations of emotions in static and moving images.
Emoji are a set of pictographs available on several electronic platforms and applications, which are gradually replacing emoticons (sequences of punctuation marks representing facial expressions). Over the last decade, researchers have proposed that emoticons not only convey emotional content in computer-mediated communication, but they may also perform pragmatic functions, such as signaling the illocutionary force of the utterance (Dresner and Herring, 2010), mitigating threatening formulations (Wilson, 1993), or strengthening expressive speech acts (Skovholt et al., 2014). Despite their growing popularity, little pragmatic research to date specifically addresses emoji. The present paper bridges this gap by exploring the functions of emoji in a corpus of WhatsApp chats written in Spanish. Drawing on Spencer-Oatey's (2000, 2005) rapport management framework, the analysis shows that emoji are used across different domains in the corpus: they not only upgrade or downgrade different speech acts (illocutionary domain), as pointed out by previous research, but they also contribute to achieving a successful interaction by signaling closing sections or by helping to negotiate openings (discourse domain), as well as serving as a way to frame playful interactions (stylistic domain). This study also shows that some practices related to the use of emoji may be influenced by Spanish culture.
In 2016, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York announced that it had acquired for its permanent collection the original set of 176 emoji characters developed in 1999 by Japan’s telecommunication provider NTT DoCoMo. MoMA also organized an exhibition of the emoji in the museum’s lobby with the title “The Original Emoji, by Shigetaka Kurita,” thus highlighting its historical significance and the role of the designer. This paper explores new and critical yet under-discussed issues surrounding MoMA’s acquisition and exhibition of the first emoji set. What happens when emoji enters an art museum? What can the MoMA’s accession and exhibition of emoji tell us about emoji, about art, and about the relationship between them? I will examine the discourses on the MoMA’s emoji accession, which reveal two positions against the emoji as art: a conservative view that emoji is not art and thus should not be in the museum and a revisionist effort to frame the emoji as a design innovation rather than as art. But I draw attention to the MoMA’s exhibition of the emoji, which I analyze as a materialized display of the originally virtual characters. Using textual and aesthetic analyses together with theories of art, I argue the emoji at MoMA is art.
This paper examines the functions of emojis as used by Omani men and women friends and relatives in messages exchanged on WhatsApp. The data consists of naturally occurring WhatsApp conversations taken from one male-only and one-female only WhatsApp groups. In order to determine the types of emojis used and the frequencies, I used what Herring (2004) describes as “coding and counting” in her description of computer-mediated discourses analysis. Then, I performed a qualitative analysis of selected extracts using theories and methods of interactional sociolinguistics. In line with studies such as Dresner and Herring (2010), the analysis of select, representative excerpts including various emojis demonstrates that emojis do not only serve as indicators of users’ emotions, but also serve many other communicative functions. They can serve as what Gumperz (1982) calls “contextualization cues”; indication of celebration; indication of approval of others’ messages; responses to expressions of thanks and compliments; conversational openings and closings; linking devices; and indication of the fulfillment of a requested task. In other words, emojis serve to create alignments between participants, structure interactive exchanges, and indicate message tone.
Electronic Mediated Communication (EMC) has become highly prevalent in our daily lives. Many of the communication formats used in EMC are text-based (e.g., instant messaging), and users often include visual paralinguistic cues in their messages. In the current study, we examined the usage of two of such cues - emoji and emoticons. Specifically, we compared self-reported frequency of use, as well as attitudes (6 bipolar items, e.g., “fun” vs. “boring”) and motives for their usage (9 motives, e.g., “express how I feel to others”). We also examined these indicators according to age and gender. Overall, participants (N = 474, 72.6% women; Mage = 30.71, SD = 12.58) reported using emoji (vs. emoticons) more often, revealed more positive attitudes toward emoji usage, and identified more with motives to use them. Moreover, all the ratings were higher among younger (vs. older) participants. Results also showed that women reported to use emoji (but not emoticons) more often and expressed more positive attitudes toward their usage than men. However, these gender differences were particularly evident for younger participants. No gender differences were found for emoticons usage. These findings add to the emerging body of literature by showing the relevance of considering age and gender, and their interplay, when examining patterns of emoji and emoticons use.
Recent studies have found that people interpret emoji characters inconsistently, creating significant potential for miscommunication. However, this research examined emoji in isolation, without consideration of any surrounding text. Prior work has hypothesized that examining emoji in their natural textual contexts would substantially reduce potential for miscommunication. To investigate this hypothesis, we carried out a controlled study with 2,482 participants who interpreted emoji both in isolation and in multiple textual contexts. After comparing the variability of emoji interpretation in each condition, we found that our results do not support the hypothesis in prior work: when emoji are interpreted in textual contexts, the potential for miscommunication appears to be roughly the same. We also identify directions for future research to better understand the interplay between emoji and textual context.
Measurement of emotional associations to food/beverage stimuli and consumption situations provide consumer insights that extend beyond hedonic responses. The aim of this research was to compare emoji, a novel approach in product-focused emotion research, with emotion words, an established approach. Focus was directed to questionnaires, which are popular in this field of research. The questionnaires were overall comparable in meanings conveyed by the emoji/emotion words, and matched for length. Eight studies with a total of 1121 consumers in New Zealand and China were conducted with tasted foods and written stimuli. The studies were diverse and compatible with an explorative research strategy. While emoji, overall, were more discriminative than emotion words, the findings were highly study specific. When tasted foods with medium/large sample differences were used, emoji and emotion words showed similar performance overall, although emotion words better discriminated between most liked samples and emoji better discriminated between lesser liked samples. When samples were more similar, emoji generally were more discriminative, although emotion words still discriminated well for the pairs of most liked samples. Among Chinese consumers, there was some evidence to suggest less suitability of emotion words to characterise and discriminate written stimuli that elicited negative emotions (e.g., drinking cold water). Emoji profiles, on the other hand, fitted expectations, and this difference could be linked to the influence of national culture. Taken together, the results from this research suggest that emoji questionnaires can have several advantages (depending on the specifics of the study). However, their multiple meanings can be an obstacle. Overall, practitioners are advised to not select emotion questionnaire method independently from other experimental factors, but make an informed study-specific decision as to the choice of emoji or emotion word questionnaires. Additional research that eliminate some of the differences between the studies in this research are recommended to corroborate the present conclusions.
Emoticons are getting more popular as the new communication channel to express feelings in online communication. Although familiarity to emoticons depends on cultures, how exposure matters in emotion recognition from emoticon is still open. To address this issue, we conducted a cross-cultural experimental study among Cameroon and Tanzania (hunter-gatherers, swidden farmers, pastoralists, and city dwellers) wherein people rarely experience emoticons and Japan wherein emoticons are popular. Emotional emoticons (e.g., ☺) as well as pictures of real faces were presented on a tablet device. The stimuli expressed a sad, neutral, or happy feeling. The participants rated the emotion of stimulus on a Sad–Happy Scale. We found that the emotion rating for the real faces was slightly different but similar among three cultural groups, which supported the “dialect” view of emotion recognition. Contrarily, while Japanese people were also sensitive to the emotion of emoticons, Cameroonian and Tanzanian people hardly read emotion from emoticons. These results suggested that the exposure to emoticons would shape the sensitivity to emotion recognition of emoticons, that is, ☺ does not necessarily look smiling to everyone.
Emoji are increasingly popular in computer-mediated communications, and people often use them spontaneously. This indicates a potential to harness emoji for use in consumer research. However, little is known about how consumers interpret emoji and what meanings are associated to different emoji. In a study of 33 facial emoji, conducted with Chinese consumers (n=1084), the present research begins to close this knowledge gap. Data were collected in an online survey that asked participants to select words they perceived as being applicable for describing the emotional meaning of the emoji (CATA question with 39 terms). The studied emoji spanned a broad range of emotions, which varied in valence (e.g., smiling face vs. angry face) and arousal (e.g., sleepy face and face with stuck out tongue and winking eye). A strong association with one emotion/mood was established for 15 emoji, and associations of lesser strength with several but related emotions/moods was established for 10 emoji. The remaining emoji (n=8) were associated with different moods and emotions, indicating multiple and unrelated meanings. Emoji with similar facial expression had largely similar meanings (e.g., neutral face and expressionless face; and the different smiling face emoji). For most emoji, consumers’ interpretations corresponded to meanings listed in internet resources, and there was also concordance between the empirical results and the internet meanings with regard to multiple words being applicable to describing every emoji. Validation of the established meanings is required, and in the future consideration should be given to agreement/disagreement among consumers in emoji meaning. Extension of the research to other consumer populations and emoji is needed.
The use of emoticons and emoji is increasingly popular across a variety of new platforms of online communication. Moreover, they have also become popular as stimulus materials in scientific research. However, the assumption that emoji/emoticon users’ interpretation always corresponds to the developers/researchers intended meaning might be misleading. This paper presents subjective norms of emoji and emoticons provided by everyday users. The Lisbon Emoji and Emoticon Database (LEED) comprises 238 stimuli: 85 emoticons and 153 emoji (iOS, Android, Facebook and Emojipedia). The sample included 505 Portuguese participants recruited online. Each participant evaluated a random subset of 20 stimuli in seven evaluative dimensions: aesthetic appeal, familiarity, visual complexity, concreteness, valence, arousal and meaningfulness. Participants were additionally asked to attribute meaning to each stimulus. The norms obtained include quantitative descriptive results (mean, standard deviation and confidence intervals), and meaning analysis per stimulus. We also examined the correlations between the dimensions, and tested for differences between emoticons and emoji, as well as between two major operating systems – Android and iOS. The LEED constitutes a readily available normative database (available at www.osf.io/nua4x) with potential applications to different research domains.
Many non-standard elements of 'netspeak' writing can be viewed as efforts to replicate the linguistic role played by nonverbal modalities in speech, conveying contextual information such as affect and interpersonal stance. Recently, a new non-standard communicative tool has emerged in online writing: emojis. These unicode characters contain a standardized set of pictographs, some of which are visually similar to well-known emoticons. Do emojis play the same linguistic role as emoticons and other ASCII-based writing innovations? If so, might the introduction of emojis eventually displace the earlier, user-created forms of contextual expression? Using a matching approach to causal statistical inference, we show that as social media users adopt emojis, they dramatically reduce their use of emoticons, suggesting that these linguistic resources compete for the same communicative function. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the adoption of emojis leads to a corresponding increase in the use of standard spellings, suggesting that all forms of non-standard writing are losing out in a competition with emojis. Finally, we identify specific textual features that make some emoticons especially likely to be replaced by emojis.
The chapter carries out a social semiotic multimodal analysis of the affordances of mobile devices. Through the analysis of the hardware and software design and of the functionalities of a Nokia N95, taken as an instance of various smartphone models, the chapter analyses what types of representations are foregrounded and backgrounded by these devices and the abilities, which are more or less required for their use. The chapter concludes by detailing the social habitus, which is fostered through the introduction of mobile devices in our media landscape, together with some possible implications for educational contexts.
Credible Checklists and Quality Questionnaires starts off with an examination of the critical but commonly overlooked checklist method. In the second chapter, questionnaires and surveys are discussed. Asking questions sounds simple, but the hard truth is that asking questions (and designing questionnaires) is a difficult task. This chapter discusses being mindful of the choice of words, order of questions and how early questions influence later questions, answer scales and how they impact the user response, questionnaire design, and much more. The final chapter provides examples of some common questionnaires (both free and fee-based) for assessing the usability of products. After reading this book, readers will be able to use these user design tools with greater confidence and certainty.
(Hand-) gestures play many diverse roles in human life and do many different jobs in social interaction. Gesture - simple emblems like the thumbs-up sign as much as ongoing gesticulation that accompanies talk - is a most flexible resource that is utilized in a multitude of cultural practices, ranging from legal proceedings to work in mines to the making of music and intimate moments of talk, and it is always in play when people collaborate with their hands on common tasks. The practices of gesture are heterogeneous and difficult to subsume under a common denominator, other than that the activity involves communicative action of the hands. The view adopted here is focused by the question how gesture serves persons -. embodied actors - who are acting in the world together, within specific ecological and cultural settings, and together making sense of it; gesture is conceived as a mode (or set of modes) of bodily action by which the world is structured, known and understood, not in the first place as a system of signs or a mode of expression.
More than any other feature, computer-mediated communication (CMC) cues such as emoticons and other typographic markers are associated with digital communication, including text-based chat. Using transcripts from college classroom discussions, this study adopts a pragmatic perspective to analyze how advanced foreign language learners use CMC cues, including emoticons (“:-)”), nonstandard/multiple punctuation (“…”, “!!!”), and lexical surrogates (“hmmm”) in a quasi-synchronous computer-mediated consensus-building discussion. Rather than taking form-meaning pairings for granted (e.g., smiley “:)” means “happy”), I adopt a microanalytic approach to show systematic, empirically grounded correlations between CMC cues and their interpretations in different contexts. I argue that the results must be interpreted and viewed alongside the large body of research on emotive communication in offline modes to better understand the pragmatics of online relational work.
Pictograms and icons that are not easily recognised by the users run the risk of being under-used or even superfluous. Well-designed pictograms allow the user to recognise the represented functions of a device (e.g. of a computer interface) without the need of extra instruction.It is argued that it is imperative that pictograms be empirically tested in order to establish whether the user does indeed associate the appropriate referent. A number of pictogram evaluation methods are available with some of them being restricted to certain applications only and others having considerable methodological drawbacks. The Multiple Index Approach for the evaluation of pictograms is presented which has been developed by the Technical Committee Human Factors of the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI). It focuses on both correct associations and errors and takes into account aesthetic as well as performance parameters.
Pictograms, designed to be a universal communication system, are often created from several concrete and easily recognizable drawings. Does understanding depend on a logical approach? Or is it the ability to inhibit the concrete sense of each picture that allows access to a higher level of comprehension? (ability to abstract). These executive functions are sensitive to the effects of aging and educational level. The aim of our study was to evaluate the nature of the cognitive processes underlying the meaning of pictograms and to test the effect of aging and educational level.
We enrolled 19 older adults (60-69 years old) and 63 young adults (20-29 years old). Of these 63 young adults, 43 had a high educational level (Young-High participants), and 20 had a lower educational level (Young-Low participants). Each participant was asked the meaning of 20 pictograms and underwent an assessment of abstraction and logical abilities with WAIS-III test.
Older adults had lower pictogram assessment scores and abstraction and logical abilities when compared with young adults. In both groups, abstraction and logical abilities were correlated with the interpretation of pictograms but only abstraction ability remains strongly correlated with pictogram comprehension in the older group after adjustment of sex, age and educational level. Consequently, the poorer performances of older adults to determine the meaning of pictograms could be explained by the decline of abstraction ability in elderly.
Pictograms are not the universal communication system as we formerly thought. Age and educational level may influence the performance in determining the meaning of pictograms.
Pictograms form part of our daily lives through their use in medication, transport, computers, etc., because they indicate - in iconic form - places, directions, actions or constraints on actions in either the real world (a town, a road, etc.) or virtual space (computer desktop, Internet, etc.). This chapter is essentially a review of research on the pictogram effect, which can be summed up as follows: a pictogram is better than a label, and recognizing an image is easier than reading text (Norman, 1990). This review covers theoretical and experimental studies from linguistics, psychology and cognitive ergonomics on the design and validation, comprehension and usage of pictograms. Among the various methods, an emphasis is placed on classification and the creation of pictogram taxonomies as tools for homogenization and design.
The reception of mobile communication and internet by Japan’s youth in the late 1990s has determined the shaping of the mobile communication market in this country. From a business-oriented device, mobile phones were transformed into an intensely personal part of the users’ lives, particularly notable for offering a spectacular interactive playscape that challenges the tyranny of everyday life. Rather than being a trivial mechanism of stress release or a means to make the in-between temporalities of everyday life more enjoyable, this playscape has come to be a cultural arena that both reflects as well as induces socio-cultural change. In reconstructing the cultural production of Japan’s cellular playscape, this article focuses on two sets of issues. The first is the contextualization of the mobile communication market in Japan within broader cultural processes in which youths have become the new cultural avant-garde of urban lifestyles. The second is an analysis of how the merging of play into everyday life through mobile communication technologies is creating new modes of relating to the social, technological and urban environments.
The term "emoticons" -short for "emotion icons" -refers to graphic signs, such as the smiley face, that often accompany computer-mediated textual communication. They are most often characterized as iconic indicators of emotion, conveyed through a communication channel that is parallel to the linguistic one. In this article, it is argued that this conception of emoticons fails to account for some of their important uses. We present a brief outline of speech act theory and use it to provide a complementary account of emoticons, according to which they also function as indicators of illocutionary force. We conclude by considering how our analysis bears upon broader questions concerning language, bodily behavior, and text.
Predicting whether the intended audience will be able to recognize the meaning of an icon or pictograph is not an easy task. Many icon recognition studies have been conducted in the past. However, their findings cannot be generalized to other icons that were not included in the study, which, we argue, is their main limitation. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive taxonomy of icons that is intended to enable the generalization of the findings of recognition studies. To accomplish this, we analyzed a sample of more than eight hundred icons according to three axes: lexical category, semantic category, and representation strategy. Three basic representation strategies were identified: visual similarity; semantic association; and arbitrary convention. These representation strategies are in agreement with the strategies identified in previous taxonomies. However, a greater number of subcategories of these strategies were identified. Our results also indicate that the lexical and semantic attributes of a concept influence the choice of representation strategy.
Emoticons (ASCII-based character strings) and smilies (pictograms) are widely used in computer-mediated communication as substitutes to compensate for the absence of nonverbal cues. Although their usage has been investigated in numerous studies, it remains open whether they provoke differential effects and whether they lead to person perception patterns similar to what is known from face-to-face interactions. Based on findings from research about person perception and nonverbal communication, we investigated the differential effects of smilies and emoticons with regard to recipients' mood, message evaluation, and person perception in an experimental online study (n=127) with a 2(smiley/emoticon) by 2(positive/negative) between-subjects design (with an additional control condition). Results generally support earlier findings, indicating that the valence of the cue (smiley or emoticon) affects the corresponding impression formation. Further, findings concerning the differential influence of both forms of cues show that there are no differences with regard to message interpretation, whereas smiling smilies have a stronger impact on personal mood than smiling emoticons. The perception of a writer's commitment was only altered by smilies, suggesting that they elicit a stronger impact than emoticons.
El autor ofrece un acercamiento al mundo de las historietas desde el punto de vista de que se trata de un medio de comunicación con una estructura y un lenguaje propio. Analizan los diversos elementos de las historietas, desde el vocabulario hasta su diseño y su retórica.
Inventario enciclopédico ilustrado por casi 2 mil viñetas de historietas (que datan desde finales del siglo XIX hasta hoy), de símbolos y recursos lingüísticos utilizados por los comics, en el que se analizan sus convenciones, sus elementos literarios y sus técnicas narrativas.
As multimedia computing becomes the order of the day, so there is a greater need to understand and to come to terms with the problems of visual presentation. This paper deals with iconic languages as a means of communicating ideas and concepts without words. Two example systems, developed respectively at the universities of Exeter and Brighton, are described. Both embody basic principles of the iconic communication which,, though not unique to learning technology, is forming an increasingly important part of user‐interfaces, including those in the area computer‐assisted learning.
The semiotics of emoji: The rise of visual language in the age of the Internet
- M Danesi
Danesi, M. (2017). The semiotics of emoji: The rise of
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New York, NY: Bloomsbury.
Characterising the inventive appropriation of emoji as relationally meaningful in mediated close personal relationships. Paper presented at the Experiences of Technology Appropriation: Unanticipated Users, Usage, Circumstances, and Design conference
- R Kelly
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presented at the Experiences of Technology
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Circumstances, and Design conference, Oslo, Norway.
Retrieved from https://researchportal.bath.ac.uk/en/
publications/characterising-the-inventive-appropriationof-emoji-as-relational
Correcting the record on the first emoji set. Emojipedia
- J Burge
Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year 2015 is
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