Neurolinguistic Processing And Social Stress Of Emojis In Emotionally Ambiguous Texts

Abstract

Emojis are symbols that are utilized in computer-mediated communication to provide emotional and social cues to interlocutors. There is little prior research regarding the processing of emojis with or without context. We investigated neural responses to positive and negative emojis both before and after emotionally ambiguous sentences. Our research sought to identify the differences in processing between negative and positive emojis, and between emojis with and without context. We found that negative emojis produced a stronger N170 effect than positive emojis when placed before texts, and that they produced a stronger P200 effect than positive emojis when placed after texts. Emojis placed before texts produced stronger N170 effects than punctuation, indicating they are processed fully as faces. Emojis placed after texts produced stronger LPC effects than punctuation, but no significant N170 effect, indicating that they are instead processed for only emotional content.