Who’s smiley now?

Emoji are cartoon representations of human faces, animals, and various objects that were in some sense an extension of the text-character based representations known as emoticons or smileys. The term derives from Japanese – e “picture” + moji “character”, so the “emo” is a happy, and ironic, coincidence.

Emoji have become an integral part of digital communication, especially in the age of social media, helping convey emotions and tone in text-based interactions that often lack the nuances of face-to-face conversation. However, research in the International Journal of Social and Humanistic Computing suggests that inconsistency in the use of emoji can lead to confusion, frustration, and negative reactions, particularly in the context of social media.

Emmanuel Adu-Mensah, Solomon Odei-Appiah, and Raphael Amponsah of the Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration in Accra, Ghana, surveyed 400 users to see how exaggeration, misapplication, and excessive use of emoji might distort communication and provoke unintended emotional responses. The team used the Cognitive Dissonance Process Model (CDPM) and found that discrepancies between a sender’s intended meaning and the recipient’s interpretation of a given emoji can create a sense of psychological discomfort, known as cognitive dissonance.

Cognitive dissonance occurs when there is a mismatch between a person’s attitudes or beliefs and their behaviour, leading to mental discomfort. In this case, when the use of emoji does not align with the message being conveyed, it triggers negative emotions such as frustration, confusion, and irritation. The study reveals that these emotional responses not only affect the quality of communication but also have the potential to affect detrimentally the relationships between sender and recipient. Emoji are often used as shorthand for expressing one’s feelings, but the study shows that their overuse or misapplication can cloud the original message.

A common issue that can arise is when a given user imagines a certain meaning for a specific emoji that isn’t the usual interpretation and their correspondent understands the emoji to mean something else. In the language of text messaging a similar issue arises with the use of LOL for instance, most people understand the meaning to be “laugh out loud”, but others infamously took it erroneously to mean “lots of love”. Similarly, in the world of emoji, a sender might that sharing the aubergine/eggplant, cucumber, banana, avocado, peach, or pineapple emoji that they are innocently discussing fruit and veg, whereas others would place an entirely NSFW (not safe for work) interpretation on the use of those emoji. Other examples of potentially confusing emoji are given in the footnote.

When things go wrong the “face with tears of joy” may well go all “sad face” and nobody will be “LOL” any more.

Adu-Mensah, E., Odei-Appiah, S. and Amponsah, R. (2024) ‘When emojis go bad: emotional and cognitive concerns on their exaggeration, mis-application and excessive usage’, Int. J. Social and Humanistic Computing, Vol. 4, No. 3, pp.277–306.

Footnote

More putatively confusing emoji