Jul 11, 2023 21:00:00

Humans are easier to read emotions from 'pictograms' than from real facial expressions

Emoji, which are also called 'emoji' overseas, are

useful for expressing feelings in messages and emails where it is difficult to convey detailed nuances. increase. An Italian study found that emoji can convey emotions more accurately and quickly than actual facial expressions.

Emojis vs. facial expressions: An electrical neuroimaging study on perceptual recognition: Social Neuroscience: Vol 18, No 1
https://doi.org/10.1080/17470919.2023.2203949

People are better at decoding emojis compared to real facial expressions, study finds
https://www.psypost.org/2023/07/people-are-better-at-decoding-emojis-compared-to-real-facial-expressions-study-finds-166233

When you actually meet and talk, you use not only words but also non-verbal communication such as facial expressions, eye contact, and tone of voice. On the other hand, in social media and messaging apps, voices and faces cannot be directly conveyed to the other party, so emojis are often used to express emotions and feelings instead.

In order to investigate how accurately these pictograms can express emotions, Alice Mado Probarbio et al. rice field.

For the experiment, the research team prepared 48 facial photographs and 48 pictograms representing six basic emotions: joy, sadness, surprise, fear, anger, and disgust. Then, 51 men and women between the ages of 18 and 35 were shown words that represent emotions, then they were shown pictograms or photographs of their faces, and they were asked to answer whether the emotions they read matched the words. Reading accuracy, reaction speed, and electrical signals in the participants' brains were recorded.

The results of the experiment showed that people reacted an average of 73 milliseconds faster when they were shown emojis than when they were shown a picture of their face. Also, the accuracy was as high as 92.7% for pictograms, but only 82.43% for face photos.

The fact that emojis are easier to respond to is also supported by the brain's response. When the research team analyzed

event-related potentials , which are the brain's response to external stimuli, the brain wave response was greater when the word and the image seen later did not match, especially in the case of pictograms. It turns out that the amplitude was larger than the case.

The experiment also found that happy faces were the most quickly recognizable, while surprise and anger were the second and third most recognizable facial expressions, respectively. Fearful facial expressions, on the other hand, took the longest to recognize. This trend was the same for both emoji and face photos.

It should be noted that this study has 51 participants, which is a small number of samples. In addition, while facial expressions change in real time when communicating while looking at a person's face, still images were used in the experiment.

Based on these points, the research team stated in the paper, ``It is possible to hypothesize that pictograms are superior to faces in terms of reaction speed, accuracy, and short time lag due to their schematicity. Due to the fact that such details are omitted and the parts of the face drawn are limited, it is possible that emotions are easier to classify with emoji than with faces, at least in still images. That is,' he concluded.