A study conducted in Italy found that people are better and faster at recognizing the emotions displayed by emojis compared to real facial expressions. Fear was the most challenging emotion to identify in both emojis and real faces. The study was published in Social Neuroscience.
Emojis are small pictures used in written communication on social media, messaging apps, and other informal platforms. They can represent various things like facial expressions, objects, food, places, and more. Emojis are different from emoticons, which are combinations of characters that create facial expressions or gestures.
The purpose of emojis is to replace the nonverbal aspects of communication in written exchanges. Nonverbal communication includes facial expressions, body language, gestures, tone of voice, and eye contact. These nonverbal cues convey emotions, attitudes, intentions, and provide additional meaning to verbal communication. In written communication, these cues are absent, so emojis serve as a substitute.
However, for emojis to be a good substitute for nonverbal elements of communication, it must be easy for individuals to interpret their meaning. Researchers Linda Dalle Nogare and Alice Mado Proverbio conducted a study to explore this. They wanted to know whether emojis representing facial expression of emotions elicit brain reactions that are similar to those caused by real facial expressions.
The researchers focused on a specific type of brain response called event-related potentials (ERPs), which are electrical signals recorded from the brain in response to specific events or stimuli. The researchers also wanted to assess how accurately individuals recognize different emojis and facial expressions of emotions.
Participants, 51 in total (25 females), were divided into two groups. They were between 18 and 35 years of age. All were right-handed and declared that they never suffered from psychiatric or neurological disorders and that they have good vision.
The study involved 51 participants between the ages of 18 and 35, divided into two groups. They were all right-handed, had good vision, and reported no psychiatric or neurological disorders. The researchers created a collection of 48 emojis and 48 pictures of real faces, each representing the six basic emotions: joy, sadness, surprise, fear, anger, and disgust. These images were pretested to ensure participants could correctly recognize the emotions they represented.
During the study, participants sat in an isolated room while a word indicating an emotion was briefly shown on a screen, followed by a picture of either an emoji or a real facial expression. Participants had to indicate whether the facial expression matched the emotion indicated by the word. Electrodes were used to record brain activity during these tasks.
The participants tended to respond faster with their right hand compared to their left hand. They were also more accurate at recognizing happy faces and slower when recognizing fearful faces. Surprise and anger were recognized more quickly than other emotions. These patterns were observed for both emojis and real faces.
Participants were faster in recognizing happy faces than all other emotions and slowest when recognizing fear. Surprised and angry faces were the second and the third emotions participants recognized fastest. This was the case both with emojis and photos of faces.
On average, participants reacted 73 milliseconds faster when responding to emojis compared to real faces. They were also more accurate in recognizing emotions represented by emojis, with 92.7% correct responses compared to 82.43% for real faces. Electroencephalographic data confirmed these findings. Specific components of the electroencephalogram had higher amplitudes when the word and the picture did not match, compared to when they were a match. They also had higher amplitudes in participants who were shown emojis than in those who were shown faces.
“In conclusion, it can be hypothesized that the advantage of emoji over faces, demonstrated by the response speed, accuracy, latency, and amplitude of P300 response [a positive wave in the electroencephalogram that occurs 300 ms after a person is shown a significant stimulus], depended on their schematicity. The lack of realistic details and of the diversity associated to people identities, along with the limited number of facial details depicted, might contribute to the easier emotional categorization of emojis compared to faces, at least with regard to static stimuli,” the study authors concluded.
The study sheds light on an important aspect of perceptions of emotions. However, it should be noted that the study sample was small and facial expressions of emotions were not pictures of people really experiencing the emotions represented, but of people acting the emotional expressions. Additionally, information about the emotional state of the person one is communicating with is not derived from a static picture in real life.
The paper, “Emojis vs. facial expressions: an electrical neuroimaging study on perceptual recognition”, was authored by Linda Dalle Nogare and Alice Mado Proverbio.
