Emojis as Tools for Emotion Work: Communicating Affect in Text Messages

Abstract

Emojis are pictures commonly used in texting. The use and type of emojis has increased in recent years; particularly emojis that are not faces, but rather objects. While prior work on emojis of faces suggest their primary purpose is to convey affect, few have researched the communicative purpose of emojis of objects. In the current work, two experiments assess whether emojis of objects also convey affect. Different populations of participants are shown text messages with or without different emojis of objects, asked to rate the message's affective content, and indicate their confidence in their ratings. Overall results suggest that emojis of objects communicate positive affect, specifically joy. These findings are framed in the sociological theory of emotion work, suggesting that the time and effort involved in using emojis may help maintain and enhance social relationships.

“I know you can do this” versus “How can you be so stupid?” Feedback among Chinese and American young adult friends

“…Around the time we started collecting data, the New York Times declared, “The Emoji Have Won the Battle of Words” (Bennett, ). Emojis help signify nonverbal emotions and social context during screen‐based communication (Stark & Crawford, ), even when they only show objects (e.g., Riordan, ). We first tested how similarly people from each culture rated six common emojis.…”

Peaches and eggplants or. . . something else? The role of context in emoji interpretations

“…Related Work. Linguistic research on emojis has explored various uses of emojis and emoticons, such as marking illocutionary force and communicating affect (e.g., Dresner & Herring (2010), Herring & Dainas (2017), Riordan (2017a)). Not only can emojis perform numerous communicative functions, a specific emoji can be ambiguous in its communicative contribution.…”

“…Screenshots were inserted into the surveys as images, removing the possibility for cross-platform visual differences of the emojis. A continuous, unnumbered sliding scale (as opposed to an ordinal integer scale) was used to allow for parametric analysis (e.g., Allen & Seaman (2007), Sullivan & Artino (2013), Weissman (2019)). Participants saw only one stimulus and provided one rating; this prohibits using a mixed-effects model for analysis but counteracts in-survey comparison bias in ratings.…”

“…Nonetheless, t.tests indicate that the inclusion of a wink emoji significantly increases the sexualness rating in all three context conditions. Riordan's Riordan (2017b) Riordan (2017a) exploration of emoji-based affect marking can explain this finding; including a wink emoji, no matter how benign the preceding discourse, can introduce an element of playfulness or flirtation. It is, however, worth noting that despite the significant difference in ratings, the mean ratings for messages with these emojis are all under 30 on the 100-point scale -decidedly nonsexual compared to any messages with the euphemistic emojis.…”

Three Essays on Understanding Consumer Engagement with Brand Posts on Social Media

“…According to the Emojitracker.com, a website that monitors the emoji use on Twitter in real time, 24 of the top 50 emojis are non-face emojis (at the time accessed by the author on April 10, 2018, at 6:00 pm), implying a widely accepted communicative role of non-face emojis. Indeed, recent research has shown that non-face emojis can serve the two communicative roles of face emojis as well (Kaye et al, 2016;Riordan, 2017aRiordan, & 2017b. For example, it was found that tweets with emojis (either face or non-face) were consistently more positive than those without, indicating that non-face emojis carry emotional information as well (Novak, Smailović, Sluban, & Mozetič, 2015).…”