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Emotion

How do emoticons and text combine to show our mood?

Aldunate N, Villena-González M, Rojas-Thomas F, et al. · Frontiers in psychology · 2018

Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC

When text messages and emoticons contradict each other, people tend to assume the sender is in a bad mood, especially when the emoticon itself is negative.

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Key findings

The researchers found that when messages were ambiguous—meaning the text and emoticon had opposite emotional charges—participants were more likely to judge the sender as being in a bad mood. This negative bias was much stronger when the message ended with a negative emoticon than when it ended with a positive one. Additionally, participants took longer to respond to conflicting messages than to congruent ones, particularly when evaluating negative emoticons.

Methodology

To investigate how people resolve emotional contradictions in digital messages, researchers tested 74 undergraduate students in a laboratory experiment. Participants read 60 simulated text-message conversations where a situational sentence of positive or negative valence was followed by a positive or negative typographic emoticon. For each trial, participants quickly decided whether the sender was in a good or bad mood while their reaction times were recorded.

Limitations

The study relied on simple typographic emoticons, meaning the findings may not perfectly translate to modern, visually detailed emojis. It also did not account for how participants perceived sarcasm or irony, which commonly occur in conflicting messages. Finally, because the sample consisted entirely of 74 young university students, the results may not generalize to older adults or different cultural groups who use digital communication differently.

How this study connects

Role on claims

Each row is a claim on a concept or method page where this paper supports, challenges, or qualifies the statement. Roles are hand-checked — not a model guess.

  • SupportsValenceconcept

    Encountering messages with conflicting emotional valence (such as a positive text paired with a negative emoticon) triggers a negative bias, leading people to interpret the sender's mood as negative.

    Evidence for the claim as stated.

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