Dalle Nogare, L.; Cerri, A.; Proverbio, A.M. Emojis Are Comprehended Better than Facial Expressions, by Male Participants. Behav. Sci.2023, 13, 278.
Dalle Nogare, L.; Cerri, A.; Proverbio, A.M. Emojis Are Comprehended Better than Facial Expressions, by Male Participants. Behav. Sci. 2023, 13, 278.
Dalle Nogare, L.; Cerri, A.; Proverbio, A.M. Emojis Are Comprehended Better than Facial Expressions, by Male Participants. Behav. Sci.2023, 13, 278.
Dalle Nogare, L.; Cerri, A.; Proverbio, A.M. Emojis Are Comprehended Better than Facial Expressions, by Male Participants. Behav. Sci. 2023, 13, 278.
Abstract
Emojis are colorful ideograms resembling stylized faces commonly used for expressing emotions in instant messaging, in social network sites and in email communication. Notwithstanding their increasing and pervasive use in electronic communication, they are not much investigated in terms of their psychological properties and communicative efficacy. Here we presented 112 different human facial expressions and emojis (expressing neutrality, joy, surprise, sadness, anger, fear and disgust) to a group of 96 female and male university students engaged in the recognition of their emotional meaning. Both Analysis of Variance and Wilcoxon tests showed that men were significantly better than women at recognizing emojis (especially negative ones) while women were better than men at recognizing human facial expressions. Quite interestingly, men were better at recognizing emojis than human facial expressions per se. These findings are in line with more recent evidences suggesting how men may be more competent and inclined to use emojis to express their emotions in messaging (especially sarcasm, tease and love) than previously thought. Finally, the data indicate how emojis are less ambiguous than facial expressions (except for neutral and surprise emotions), possibly because of the limited number of fine-grained details, and the lack of morphological features conveying facial identity.
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