How emojis influence emotional communication today

Emojis are today an essential component of global languages. To an extent, they have the cross-cultural privilege of communicating emotions and feelings (and other things) without requiring a lot of mental effort for their interpretation. The origin of the word ‘emoji’ is traced back to Japanese roots, where the words ‘e’ (meaning picture) and ‘moji’ (meaning written character) come together.

Aside from the generics, words need to be carefully chosen to express what people actually feel. Saying I feel happy, great, peaceful, fine, etc., are all communicative of a spectrum of that particular feeling, which can be narrowed further down to articulate the exact feeling. Most emotion-related emojis and emoticons (emotional icons) communicate these emotions only in a general sense and cannot really touch the unexplored territories of dynamic human emotions and feelings.

With the widespread use of computer-mediated communication devices and emojis, it is worth exploring not just how much but in what ways our emotional communication is influenced by them. Research shows that, as early as 2.5 years of age, toddlers can distinguish at least six major emotions conveyed through emojis (Siying Liu and Na Li, Infant Behaviour and Development Journal, 2021). This underscores the significant impact emojis have on Gen Zs, particularly since they play a key role in the generation’s emotional communication.

In their recent study, published in the Journal of Behavioural Science, Linda Nogare et al. (2023) acknowledge a knowledge gap due to the scarcity of neuroscientific research regarding how the human brain recognises emojis and emoticons. In comparing recognisability of human facial expressions and emojis, female participants outperformed male participants in recognising fearful emojis.

Children also showed more accuracy in recognising happy and sad emoticons, while they had a poor grasp of fear and disgust emoticons. Male participants were found to be far better at recognising emojis than human facial expressions.

Ordinarily, the use of verbalised language (words or expressions, including sign language) in expressing how we feel delivers the experiences of human emotions much closer to reality, but they require some time to think and articulate, different from one-click-away emojis. Think of emojis that communicate happiness or sadness and which emojis you often use to express these feelings.

One sadness emoji cannot be representative of the different levels of experiencing sadness. One emoji cannot sufficiently capture being downcast, anguished, sorrowful, bereft, mournful, melancholic, gloomy, dismal, dejected, disheartened, despondent, heartbroken, desolate, wretched, forlorn, grief-stricken, etc.

All these are manifestations of sadness, but they are more meaningfully captured by the right words or descriptions. The same applies to other emotion-related emojis. Studies suggest that comparably negative emotion emojis often appear incongruent to the text and hinder the processing of the content of the message. (Isabelle Boutet, et al., Computers in Human Behaviour Journal, Vol. 119, 2021)

While emojis can be combined or repeated to emphasise the nature or intensity of one’s emotions, they are not always effective in accurately conveying the user’s intended expression or their actual emotional experience.

The Unicode Consortium has helped standardise and internationalise emojis; however, they still appear differently across devices, themes, and platforms. As a result, emojis may communicate emotions inconsistently, especially when users switch between different devices. Additionally, users are limited to the available emojis, a collection that does not fully represent the range of human emotions.

On the user’s end, however, the expression of emotions over computer-mediated communication is different from face-to-face communication. There is a cognitive conflict in the haphazard mirroring of emotions to quickly match the displayed emojis; however, it is insufficient, which affects not only the communication depth but also the intrapersonal understanding of one’s emotional state and its dynamics.

The use of emotion emojis is often triggered by the desire to use emojis to economise words in text and not the desire to really express how one feels, and it is more common, according to research, in social-emotional contexts than in task-oriented contexts. (Daantje Derks et al., in Computers in Human Behaviour Journal 23: 2007, 846).

Capturing emotions in the brevity of emojis makes frequent young users, who are yet to fully mature in articulating their emotions in words, get used to the shallowness of the emojis and lack experience with the slow pace of processing emotions and expressing confidently how one truly feels in words. Young people today feel more comfortable communicating by text messaging than by voice.

In text, they use emotion emojis a lot. Studies suggest that the 18-29 age group leads in the use of emojis (Statista: 2023 survey). The risk here is that the anonymity and security of computer-mediated communication can, over time, affect their objective self-awareness and emotional communication, leading to de-individualisation and other variants of antinormative behaviour (Felix Moral-Toranzo et al., 2007).

Cognisant of the bigger reality behind our emotional reality, far beyond emojis, it is crucial, especially for our young people, to practise more and more how to express their emotions and feelings in words. This will help to ensure that their emotional experiences are not confined to simplistic digital symbols but are appreciated and articulated with depth and clarity.

Shimbo Pastory is a Tanzanian journalist and social development advocate. He studies at the Loyola School of Theology, Ateneo de Manila University, Manila, Philippines.