Do emojis influence social interactions? Neural and behavioral responses to affective emojis in bargaining situations

Abstract

Emojis are nowadays a common substitute for real facial expressions to integrate emotions in social interaction. In certain contexts, emojis possibly could also transport information beyond emotions, reflecting interindividual differences or social aspects. In this study, we investigated the influence of emojis as socioemotional feedback stimuli on behavior and neural responses in a social decision game. We modified the Ultimatum Game by including emotional feedback provided by the proposer as response to the decision of the participant as receiver. Therefore, we generated identities that differed in their feedback behavior to identify differences in the processing of emotional feedback in a positive (acceptance) versus negative (rejection) frame. Regarding offer sizes, we replicated the valence effect of feedback‐related negativity for small offer sizes evoking more negative brain potentials compared to larger ones. Further, we found an effect of affective emojis on distinct ERPs: A face‐detecting neural component (N170) was examined to be a part of the processing of emojis, which resulted in significantly more negative amplitudes in response to a sad‐looking emoji compared to smiling and neutral ones. Furthermore, P3 amplitudes indicate transmission effects from the feedback emoticons to the neural processing of different offer sizes. In contrast to previous findings, P3 responses of our subjects did not depend on the offer size, but rather by which kind of partner they were made. Since some evaluative processes did not reveal any effects, emojis seem to be less effective than real facial expressions, which convey more information that is socially meaningful.

A neural perspective on when and why trait greed comes at the expense of others

“…Noisy channels (2 channels across all participants) were substituted using interpolation according to a visual inspection of the variance across time pointes. For artifact rejection, trials in which the amplitude exceeded the criterion of absolute amplitude of 300 μV within a segment or the joint probability of 4 standard deviations (joint probability of an electrode’s activity in a segment given that same electrode’s activity in all other segments or joint probability of an electrode’s activity in a segment given all other electrodes’ activities for that same segment) were excluded from further analyses (7.5% of the trials) 39 . At least 10 artifact-free trials were available per participant and condition (M = 16.6).…”

Emojis in public health and how they might be used for hand hygiene and infection prevention and control

“…It was concluded that 36 out of 91 emojis were significantly associated with extraversion, emotional stability and agreeableness. Other studies have been conducted regarding the use of emojis, especially in psychology [20][21][22][23]; yet there is only limited data on the effects of these pictographs in other fields of medicine. The latter is mainly due to the availability of many emojis describing emotion and behavior, while only a few emojis are precisely related to health and medical terms.…”

Smiling as negative feedback affects social decision-making and its neural underpinnings

“…Afterward, we applied the extensions ADJUST (Mognon, Jovicich, Bruzzone, & Buiatti, 2011) and MARA (Winkler, Haufe, & Tangermann, 2011), which operate with SASICA software (Chaumon, Bishop, & Busch, 2015) to choose ICA components for artifact rejection. Offline reference was transformed to current source density like in other ERP studies before (Kayser et al, 2010;Milne, 2011;Weiß et al, 2019a), and data were filtered with a 20-Hz low pass filter. Statistical calculations were conducted for each participant for each condition ±20 ms around the positive or negative peak, respectively.…”

“…Statistical calculations were conducted for each participant for each condition ±20 ms around the positive or negative peak, respectively. N170 latency was quantified as the negative peak between 130 and 210 ms (Johnston, Molyneux, & Young, 2014;Mussel et al, 2018;Weiß et al, 2019a) pooled at electrodes P7 and P8. Latencies for FRN were calculated as the negative peak between 200 and 400 ms at electrode site FCz,…”

“…In the present study, by realizing the socially unexpected smile, we also wanted to solve a methodological issue concerning unequally distributed feedback stimuli in preceding studies. Previous publications on emotional feedback (Mussel et al, 2018;Weiß, Gutzeit, Rodrigues, Mussel, & Hewig, 2019a;Weiß et al, 2019b) worked with different identities, who reacted with emotional expressions to accepted and rejected UG offers. However, among these identities the neutral facial expression was overrepresented (Mussel et al, 2018: in 62.5% of the conditions, feedback was neutral).…”