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posted by Fnord666 on Monday May 04 2020, @07:32AM   Printer-friendly
from the put-on-a-happy-face dept.

In face-to-face communication the speaker's meaning is conveyed not only with the words that are used, but also with the assistance of visual and verbal cues. If you asked someone what they thought of your new hairstyle, their reply of "I think it looks great" has a lot different meaning if it is delivered with a broad smile and enthusiasm, or with eye-darting after some hemming and hawing. What is more challenging is when communication is performed only through the message without these cues. A sarcastic comments takes on a whole different negative tone without these cues.

Over the years various conventions arose to add contextual meaning to a message. Long before people were LOL-ing, amateur radio operators would send "HIHI" over morse code. In the early 80s emoticons were created to add additional meaning to the various interchanges happening on Usenet. And of course, these have evolved into the ubiquitous emoji that we all know and love.

That emoji are so heavily used, it shouldn't be a surprise that they have caught the attention of people who research language and communication. A research article by Thomas Holtgraves and Caleb Robinson in the open access journal PLoS ONE looks at the effectiveness of emoji in conveying indirect meaning. Indirect replies are the kind where one needs to infer the real meaning in the statement and are typically done via the use of metaphors, sarcasm, and irony. These researchers here focused on the interpretation of face-threatening indirect replies, which are those that are ambiguous statements that don't answer the question, but their meaning is clear in the way they are answered. They looked at three types of replies, Opinions (Q: What did you think of my presentation?; A: It's hard to give a good presentation), Disclosure (Q: How are you doing in chemistry?; A: Chemistry is a difficult course), and Refusal (Q: Will you go out on a date with me Friday?; A: I sort my sock drawer on Fridays).

The researchers presented subjects with a scenario and a question. They were then presented with indirect answers that either did not include an emoji, that included an emoji with the text, or consisted only of an emoji. They found the presence of emoji allowed for the opinion and disclosure replies to be correctly interpreted faster and more accurate than if no emoji were used. However, emoji didn't seem to provide any advantage for refusals. They speculate that the indirect refusal replies, though they didn't answer the questions asked, there was no ambiguity in their meanings.

[...] Although in this research emoji facilitated recognition of intended indirect meaning for opinions and disclosures, there is no guarantee that emoji will always be facilitative. This is because the meaning of emoji is often ambiguous. For example, Miller et al [29] found that when participants rated the same emoji rendering, they disagreed on whether the conveyed sentiment was positive, neutral, or negative 25% of the time. Because of this it seems likely that emoji will sometimes hinder recognition of a sender's intended meaning. Still, emoji are ubiquitous, and users likely believe their use facilitates communication. It may be that the successful communicative use of emoji is unique to communicative dyads. That is, over time individuals in digital contact with one another may come to use and understand the meaning of certain (perhaps idiosyncratic) emoji.

Journal Reference
Thomas Holtgraves, Caleb Robinson. Emoji can facilitate recognition of conveyed indirect meaning, PLOS ONE (DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0232361)


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  • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Tuesday May 05 2020, @05:38AM

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Tuesday May 05 2020, @05:38AM (#990604) Journal

    the ubiquitous emoji that we all know and love.

    Know, yes. Love, no.

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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