Andrey Krekhov
University of Duisburg-Essen, Duisburg, NRW, Germany
We frequently utilize face emojis to express emotions in digital communication. But how wholly and precisely do such pictographs sample the emotional spectrum, and are there gaps to be closed? Our research establishes emoji intensity scales for seven basic emotions: happiness, anger, disgust, sadness, shock, annoyance, and love. In our survey (N = 1195), participants worldwide assigned emotions and intensities to 68 face emojis. According to our results, certain feelings, such as happiness or shock, are visualized by manifold emojis covering a broad spectrum of intensities. Other feelings, such as anger, have limited and only very intense representative visualizations. We further emphasize that the cultural background influences emojis' perception: for instance, linear-active cultures (e.g., UK, Germany) rate the intensity of such visualizations higher than multi-active (e.g., Brazil, Russia) or reactive cultures (e.g., Indonesia, Singapore). To summarize, our manuscript promotes future research on more expressive, culture-aware emoji design.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3491102.3517661
The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (https://chi2022.acm.org/)