Skip to main content

Psychologists say using emojis is more important than ever right now. Seriously

Whether it’s being able to freely walk outside, shop for supplies without feeling like you’re in a scene from Mad Max, or just enjoy a booming economy, there’s plenty to miss about the pre-coronavirus world. But face-to-face communication with friends and colleagues is something a lot of us are missing out on as well. Sure, an email sent from your couch can substitute for chatting by the office water cooler in terms of factual content, it still misses out on some of the more nuanced shades of personal communication favored by humans.

For that reason, researchers from the U.K.’s University of Chichester have an idea that, on the face of it, sounds kind of wacky:We should make up for the 93% of communication cues that are lost when messaging online, compared to speaking with colleagues face to face, by using emojis. Like, lots of emojis.

While the cartoon smiley faces and other pictograms might seem frivolous, they can serve as crucial tools for substituting for things like body language and tone of voice.

emoji on laptop
NurPhoto / Getty

“When we are communicating via emails, we are only revealing the content and leaving out vocal tones and facial expressions,” Dr. Moitree Banerjee, a senior psychology lecturer at the University of Chichester, told Digital Trends. “Hence we are not revealing enough cues for our colleagues to make effective inferences. Emojis can help immensely in communication as a proxy cue of attitude of the communicator. [They are] quasi-nonverbal cues. Emoticons allow receivers to correctly understand the level and direction of emotion, attitude, and attention expression. Apart from conveying the attitude, emojis can also provide reassurance that the receiver may need.”

The idea that text is a valid substitute for spoken words is something that anyone who has used some variation of the phrase “it’s not what they said, but how they said it” will be familiar with. A classic psychology study carried out in 1967 showed that someone’s tone of voice took precedence over the content of their words when determining meaning. Facial expressions additionally factor highly in inferring communicator attitudes.

More recently, a study published in 2015 reported that employees perceive face-to-face communication to be of higher quality than telephone and email communication. Face-to-face communication was also strongly and positively related to employees’ job satisfaction and their perceptions of their supervisors’ effectiveness, along with team identification.

android-emoji-feature-image
Image used with permission by copyright holder

This might help to explain why people are currently jumping on services like Zoom to turn what would have previously been an email exchange into a video call. It’s inevitable that text-based conversations will have to occur, though — which is where emojis come in.

“My suggestion is that this is the right time to move away from mindless communication to mindful communication,” Banerjee said. “It is the time to cultivate awareness and be non-judgmental; for the sender and receiver to be aware of the gaps in communication caused by this new mode of communication. It may be unorthodox to use emojis in a formal work setup. However, this might be the [moment] to break some barriers, given the current uncertain times.”

Just make sure to avoid the eggplant emoji. We hear the kids have changed what that one means. It’s no longer just the basis for a great baba ghanoush!

Editors' Recommendations

Luke Dormehl
I'm a UK-based tech writer covering Cool Tech at Digital Trends. I've also written for Fast Company, Wired, the Guardian…
This AI cloned my voice using just three minutes of audio
acapela group voice cloning ad

There's a scene in Mission Impossible 3 that you might recall. In it, our hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) tackles the movie's villain, holds him at gunpoint, and forces him to read a bizarre series of sentences aloud.

"The pleasure of Busby's company is what I most enjoy," he reluctantly reads. "He put a tack on Miss Yancy's chair, and she called him a horrible boy. At the end of the month, he was flinging two kittens across the width of the room ..."

Read more
Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards
Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

Read more
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Read more