Smile(y) – and your students will smile with you? the effects of emoticons on impressions, evaluations, and behaviour in staff-to-student communication

Abstract

A 2019, 'Smile(y)-and your students will smile with you? The effects of emoticons on impressions, evaluations, and behaviour in staff-to-student communication', Studies in Higher Education.

Fitted: the impact of academics’ attire on students’ evaluations and intentions

“…Guadagno and Cialdini 2007). Marder et al (2019) provide support in the context of instructor impression formation. They find that emoticon usage in electronic communication sent by a professor had an effect on perceived warmth and competence, which in turn affected evaluation of a professor's ability to provide feedback and students' behavioural intentions.…”

“…Such goals may be of social or economic nature and may include mutuality, need for power, identity-validation and social approval (Baumeister and Leary 1995). Impression management research has been conducted throughout a wide array of psychosocial and organisational contexts, including leader-subordinate relationships (Wayne and Ferris 1990;Wayne and Liden 1995) student perceptions of staff within higher education (Widmeyer and Loy 1988;Veletsianos 2012;Marder et al 2019), psychology and consulting (Friedlander and Schwartz 1985) and interviewing (Baron 1986;Forsythe 1990;Knouse 1994).…”

“…Student perceptions of instructor warmth and competence were measured using a 3-item, 7-point differential semantic scale for each (Warmth: 'cold' vs. 'warm' , 'unfriendly' vs. 'friendly' , 'unpleasant' vs. 'pleasant' , α = .842; Competence: 'clumsy' vs. 'skillful' , 'incompetent' vs. 'competent' , 'unqualified' vs. 'qualified' , α = .883), adopted from Marder et al ( 2019). Intentions to enrol in the specified instructor's course (compared to an alternative course they were told they were eligible for) were also measured, using a 3-item, 7-point Likert scale (e.g.…”

“…'How would you rate this instructors' ability to give feedback?' , α = .912), adapted from Marder et al ( 2019). A full list of measures, items, and reliability is shown in Appendix 1.…”

“…Using informal language in emails, such as emoticons (e.g. Marder et al 2019;Li, Chan, and Kim 2019), helps the sender appear warmer but makes them also seem less competent, with consequences for receivers' evaluations, preferences and intentions. To the authors' best knowledge, current research on the effect of academic dress formality is void of an explicit investigation of the 'big two' .…”