What Did They Mean by That? Young Adults' Interpretations of 105 Common Emojis

Abstract

Emojis are a form of ideograms, consisting of icons intended to represent facial expressions, emotions, objects, or other symbols, most commonly used in technologies such as smartphones, tablets, and computers. Although the smiley face (a commonly used emoji) first appeared in the 1960s (Bai et al., 2019), emoji use has recently become ubiquitous, with more than six billion being sent daily (Evans, 2017). Despite being discounted by some as a degraded form of communication that is ruining language (e.g., Jones, 2015), there is substantial linguistic evidence that emoji are not a threat to natural language, but, rather, they are a useful augmentation of natural language that enhance its communicative capacities (Evans, 2017). This is particularly true because the types of written communication found in text messages, emails, Tweets, and other such technologies are often prone to misinterpretation without paralinguistic cues (e.g., gesture, intonation, facial expressions). Emojis can function as paralinguistic information (Tantawi and Rosson, 2019), and they can help disambiguate alternative interpretations, convey emotion, sarcasm, and other kinds of information normally only available in spoken face-to-face communication (Holtgraves and Robinson, 2020). Indeed, emoji are so powerful in their communicative conveyance that an entirely emoji-based message was responsible for a teenager's alleged terrorist threat in New York in 2015 (Evans, 2017). Thus, emojis are a popular and robust form of meaning-making. Emojis have also proven to be effective in studying cognitive phenomena without the influence of language. For example, Marengo et al. (2017) asked participants to respond to a brief Big Five Personality inventory and to 91 emojis drawn from the Apple Color Emoji fontset. Findings suggest that of the 91 emojis presented participant responses to 36 were correlated with their responses to three of the five personality traits. The responses to emojis were most related to emotions and affective processing. These researchers also empirically developed an emoji based instrument to assess depressive symptoms (Marengo et al., 2019). Marengo et al. (2019) conducted two studies to develop the emoji-based depression assessment. In the first study they asked young adults to indicate if each of the 36 emojis presented represented a way they felt during much of the past week. They also asked participants to complete a 10-item depression inventory. The association between the emojis and the depression measure items were calculated and the emoji with the 10 strongest associations with depression inventory items were tested for convergent validity and regression analyses allowed for accurate detection of depressive symptoms using the 10-item emoji scale. The results of the studies by Marengo and colleagues demonstrate the utility of emojis beyond language, with opportunities to create and study language-free measures of various cognitive phenomena, including personality, depressive symptoms, and perhaps other individual differences. One possible way to increase the validity and robustness of such findings would be to use established norms regarding the interpretation of the emojis, thus allowing for experimental hypothesis testing regarding the relationships between emoji interpretation and other psychological constructs. Despite their ubiquity and communicative power, the cognitive mechanisms supporting emoji comprehension and use remain elusive, although some research is starting to shed light on their role in semantic processing. For example, Weissman and Tanner (2018) examined whether emoji could induce language-like semantic processing. Event-related potentials were collected while participants read sentences like “The cake she made was terrible.” These sentences were followed by emoji that matched (), mismatched (), or that indicated irony or sarcasm (). Relative to those control trials, irony and sarcasm emojis elicited P600 and P200 event-related potentials, similar to the potentials elicited by purely verbal irony, suggesting that emoji and language might be processed similarly, at least in the case of irony and sarcasm. Emojis appear to also enhance regular language processing. Chatzichristos et al. (2020) found that emojis (compared to pseudoword controls) trigger more complex processing of the words they are paired with. Emojis also appear to facilitate meaning comprehension when the meaning of an utterance is indirect (Holtgraves and Robinson, 2020). Not only can emojis facilitate comprehension of language, but they also can aid in disambiguating other emojis. For example, adding a wink emoji to a message with food emojis that are not associated with sexual euphemisms can lead those same food emojis to be interpreted in a sexual way (Weissman, 2019). These findings make all the more sense in light of a recent study by Gantiva et al. (2020), who found that emoji faces elicited similar neural responses to human faces, suggesting again that emojis can provide paralinguistic information that is typically available in face-to-face, but not in text-based, communication. Emoji interpretation has also been studied without surrounding linguistic context. For example, Miller et al. (2017) examined definitions and sentiment ratings of ambiguous emojis, finding that emoji interpretation in context was not significantly less ambiguous than when they were interpreted standalone. There are at least two important caveats in much of the available research on how emojis are interpreted. First, the number of unique emojis used as stimuli has been restricted to a small pool of possible stimuli. Second, the “meanings” of the emojis used in these studies have often been assigned based on the researcher's intuition, rather than on the basis of data from norming studies. This may be particularly problematic in the case of emojis, which are very popular among the young adults who...