Mood Detection in Ambiguous Messages: The Interaction Between Text and Emoticons

Abstract

Face-to-face communication has several sources of contextual information that enables language comprehension. This information is used, for instance, to perceive mood of interlocutors, clarifying ambiguous messages. However, these contextual cues are absent in text-based communication. Emoticons have been proposed as cues used to stress the emotional intentions on this channel of communication. Most studies have suggested that their role is to contribute to a more accurate perception of emotions. Nevertheless, it is not clear if their influence on disambiguation is independent of their emotional valence and its interaction with text message valence. In the present study, we designed an emotional congruence paradigm, where participants read a set of messages composed by a positive or negative emotional situation sentence followed by a positive or negative emoticon. Participants were instructed to indicate if the sender was in a good or bad mood. With the aim of analyzing the disambiguation process and observing if the role of the emoticons in disambiguation is different according their valence, we measure the rate of responses of perceived mood and the reaction times (RTs) for each condition. Our results showed that the perceived mood in ambiguous messages tends to be more negative regardless of emotion valence. Nonetheless, we observed that this tendency was not the same for positive and negative emoticons. Specifically, negative mood perception was higher for incongruent positive emoticons. On the other hand, RTs for positive emoticons were faster than for the negative ones. Responses for incongruent messages were slower than for the congruent ones. However, the incongruent condition showed different RTs depending on the emoticons’ valence. In the incongruent condition, responses for negative emoticons was the slowest. Results are discussed taking into account previous observations about the potential role of emoticons in mood perception and cognitive processing. We concluded that the role of emoticons in disambiguation and mood perception is due to the interaction of emoticon valence with the entire message.

The Effect of High-Definition Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation of the Right Inferior Frontal Gyrus on Empathy in Healthy Individuals

“…In short, our study is consistent with previous neuroimaging and brain injury studies (Shamay-Tsoory et al, 2003 , 2009 ; Lawrence et al, 2006 ; Schulte-Rüther et al, 2007 , 2008 ; Pfeifer et al, 2008 ; Smith et al, 2015 ; Massey et al, 2017 ) and confirms the important role of the IFG in cognitive empathy and the effective role of HD-tDCS in regulating social cognitive functioning. Notably, our results also show that participants responded to negative emotional pictures longer than positive emotional pictures during cognitive empathic tasks consistent with previous studies (Leppänen and Hietanen, 2004 ; Song et al, 2017 ; Aldunate et al, 2018 ). Earlier findings have shown that during emotional recognition, happiness is recognized faster than sadness (Crews and Harrison, 1994 ; Leppänen and Hietanen, 2004 ), anger (Hugdahl et al, 1993 ) and disgust (Stalans and Wedding, 1985 ).…”

Emoji as Affective Symbols: Affective Judgments of Emoji, Emoticons, and Human Faces Varying in Emotional Content

“…They could show reaction times where shorter for happy faces than for angry faces, but no significant results could be found by comparing real faces to cartoon faces. Moreover, results by Aldunate et al (2018) suggested, that participants reacted faster to positive emoticons compared to negative ones. These results indicate that not the stimulus type plays a crucial role in terms of reaction times, but valence.…”

Increase in Beta Power Reflects Attentional Top-Down Modulation After Psychosocial Stress Induction

“…While our study shows behavioral and neurophysiological effects of psychosocial stress during the performance of a cognitive task, it is an open question to understand how stress can affect the processing of stimuli with emotional valence (Aldunate et al, 2018), or what the mechanisms are that underly the stress effects over top-down or bottom-up attentional modulations. In summary, our study presents a multilevel perspective for an integrative understanding of the mechanisms underlying psychosocial stress and attentional control.…”