Do emojis represent the whole gamut of human emotion?

By Matthew Warren Emojis have become part of our everyday communication online, allowing us to succinctly communicate how we’re feeling in a way that written language cannot. Psychologists are even beginning to use emojis in research, to allow children or other participants to respond without the need for traditional questionnaires. But is the library of emojis that is available to us truly representative of the range of emotions that we feel? A new study in Scientific Reports suggests that, broadly, it is — but that there are some important gaps too. Many psychologists have moved away from the idea that we have a handful of discrete emotions. Instead, they see our emotional experiences as falling along continuous scales of both valence — how positive or negative an emotion is — and arousal. So, for instance, “sadness” has a negative valence but is fairly low in arousal; “anger” is also negatively-valenced but high in arousal; and “excitement” is positively-valenced but still high in arousal. In their new study, Gaku Kutsuzawa and colleagues at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Kashiwa, Japan, looked at whether emojis can be classified according to valence and arousal in a similar way to our own emotions. The team asked more than 1,000 Japanese participants aged 20 to 39 to rate facial emojis on 9-point scales for both valence (ranging from “displeasure” to “pleasure”) and arousal (ranging ...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Emotion Facebook Faces Twitter Source Type: blogs