Sarcasm and emoticons: Comprehension and emotional impact

Abstract

Most theorists agree that sarcasm serves some communicative function that would not be achieved by speaking directly, such as eliciting a particular emotional response in the recipient. One debate concerns whether this kind of language serves to enhance or mute the positive or negative nature of a message. The role of textual devices commonly used to accompany written sarcastic remarks is also unclear. The current research uses a rating task to investigate the influence of textual devices (emoticons and punctuation marks) on the comprehension of, and emotional responses to, sarcastic versus literal criticism and praise, for both unambiguous (Experiment 1) and ambiguous (Experiment 2) materials. Results showed that sarcastic criticism was rated as less negative than literal criticism, and sarcastic praise was rated as less positive than literal praise, suggesting that sarcasm serves to mute the positive or negative nature of the message. In terms of textual devices, results showed that emoticons had a larger influence on both comprehension and emotional impact than punctuation marks.

Emotional responses to irony and emoticons in written language: Evidence from EDA and facial EMG

“…Although there is no single meaning or emotion expressed by any given emoticon (Dresner & Herring, ), variants of the ;) (wink‐face) and : p (tongue‐face) emoticons have been shown to frequently co‐occur with ironic statements (e.g., Carvalho, Sarmento, Silva, & De Oliveira, ; Derks, Bos, & von Grumbkow, ; Garrison, Remley, Thomas, & Wierszewski, ). These corpus observations are supported by rating studies (Filik et al, ) and by two large production studies reported in Thompson and Filik (in press), in which participants were specifically tasked with making their ironic intentions clear. The authors found that participants were significantly more likely to use variants of ;) or : p than any other emoticon or textual device (such as LOL) when explicitly signaling ironic intent.…”

Sarcasm in Written Communication: Emoticons are Efficient Markers of Intention

“…This latter suggestion may partly explain why, according to Ip (), emoticons are more effective at increasing valence ratings in the absence of standard punctuation (Ip, ). Filik et al (in press) also found that emoticons had a greater emotional impact than exclamation marks. The idea that emoticons may function as punctuation may explain why emoticons tend to appear at the start or end of an utterance (Garrison et al, ; Provine, Spencer, & Mandell, ).…”

“…Without such cues, there is a heightened risk of misinterpretation, especially since computer‐mediated communication allows written conversations with a level of immediacy close to that of speech. Facilitating correct interpretation of a message appears to be a major function of emoticons (Dresner & Herring, ; Lo, 2008), for example by marking humour (Adams, ) or sarcasm (Filik et al, in press; Walther, & D'Addario, ), or indicating a positive attitude, jokes, or irony (Skovholt et al, ).…”

An Integrated Review of Emoticons in Computer-Mediated Communication

“…Emoticons can also change the direction of a message to the opposite direction, which is the case of sarcastic utterances. A related study by Filik et al (2015) showed that emoticons are more expressive than punctuation marks in the disambiguation of sarcastic utterances. Along the same lines, González-Ibáñez et al (2011) and Muresan et al (2016) showed that emoticons in short messages like those found on microblogging platforms (e.g., Twitter) are particularly helpful for humans and machines in classifying sarcastic, non-sarcastic, positive, and negative messages.…”