EMOJIS 1 : Anger & Surprise
KEY CONCEPT: Why certain emojis succeed and others fail as expressive faces we all can recognize.
All this is to say that it’s no wonder that emojis, the little cartoon faces that were developed for text messages, have become an enormous worldwide phenomena, used for communication by billions of people, often to the extent where the written word is somewhat beside the point.
Figure 2. "Man" (left) & "House" (right) written in Chinese characters | "Emoji" is Japanese for "Picture Character." An emoji is a facial pictograph that conveys its meaning through its resemblance to an emotional state, As such, emojis are both literal and contextual -- they occupy a middle zone where their meaning is partly based on what they look like, and partly based on how they are actually used – the meaning they take on. |
Figure 3. "Relieved Face," a popular emoji to express concern combined with relief. | Fortunately, emojis are much more visually legible than Chinese characters; nonetheless, many faces require prior knowledge to be read as the sender intended. “Relieved Face” in Figure 3 provides a perfect example of why "context counts." It is currently trending at #20 for Most Popular Emoji on Twitter and is “used in response messages to friends or relatives, showing that you are sad for them but also relieved that they are okay.” This emoji attempts to depict an expression that has no clear human facial counterpart. When I tested a drawn version of this facial configuration online, respondents were almost equally split between reading the expression as sadness or fear. It is a face in obvious distress, but there is no nuance that suggests some measured assessment of another person's pain, as the definition would require. Needless to say, the tear does not change anything. |
The answer is a qualified "yes"; many emoji's depicting the cardinal expressions Fear, Sadness, Joy, Anger, and Surprise work pretty well; Disgust is another story. Emojis also become much more symbolic than descriptive when they attempt to describe emotional states that don't display as clear expressions, as in the relieved face above.
In this and future blogs, I'll look at the best and worst examples of recent emojis, starting this month with Anger and Surprise.