Special Coverage

Emojis Influence Emotional Communication, Social Perceptions, and Information Processing (130)

Isabelle Boutet, Megan Leblanc, Justin Chamberland, and Charles Collin (University of Ottawa)

Summary by Brett Myers, Digital Content Associate Editor

Texting with Emojis: The Do's and Don'ts

Isabelle Boutet talks about her team’s research on the influence of emojis in digital communication.

Remember life before face masks? We used to see people’s faces when we talked to them. Facial expression tells us a lot about the spoken message—it allows us to interpret subtleties and understand the speaker’s emotion.

Texting is a major form of communication in the digital age, but it removes the speaker’s face from the exchange. Luckily, we have a large assortment of emoji characters to help color our texts with meaning. But do emojis in text play a similar role as faces in face-to-face exchanges? Dr. Boutet asks this very question in her research.

Her team categorized sentences and emojis as being positive, negative, or neutral. Participants rated the sentences and emojis on a positive/negative scale. In most cases, there was agreement about what is positive or negative; however, the neutral emojis were rated as slightly negative. This is similar to facial expressions, where neutral expressions are perceived as somewhat negative.

Next, they paired sentences and emojis in either congruent or incongruent pairs (as shown in the image below).

They found that raters perceived the emotional state of the sender accurately in the congruent conditions. But in the incongruent pairs, there was a strong negativity effect, where the presence of a negative emoji made the overall message seem negative. Positive emojis did not have this effect (as shown in the figure below).

They also asked raters about the “warmth” of the sender, and positive emojis increased the perception of warmth regardless of the message content. Furthermore, they examined processing efficiency by tracking eye movements and found that incongruent pairs took longer to process than congruent pairs.

Bottom line: use congruent emojis when sending a text, and focus on using positive emojis if you want to keep your friends.

via GIPHY