Individual differences in emoji comprehension: Gender, age, and culture.

Emoji are an important substitute for non-verbal cues (such as facial expressions) in online written communication. So far, however, little is known about individual differences regarding how they are perceived. In the current study, we examined the influence of gender, age, and culture on emoji comprehension. Specifically, a sample of 523 participants across the UK and China completed an emoji classification task. In this task, they were presented with a series of emoji, each representing one of six facial emotional expressions, across four commonly used platforms (Apple, Android, WeChat, and Windows). Their task was to choose from one of six labels (happy, sad, angry, surprised, fearful, disgusted) which emotion was represented by each emoji. Results showed that all factors (age, gender, and culture) had a significant impact on how emojis were classified by participants. This has important implications when considering emoji use, for example, conversation with partners from different cultures.

Examining the role of context in written sarcasm comprehension: Evidence from eye-tracking during reading.

This article addresses a current theoretical debate between modular and interactive accounts of sarcasm processing, by investigating the role of context (specifically, knowing that a character has been sarcastic before) in the comprehension of a sarcastic remark. An eye-tracking experiment was conducted in which participants were asked to read texts that introduced a character as being either sarcastic or not and ended in either a literal or an unfamiliar sarcastic remark. The results indicated that when the character was previously literal, a subsequent sarcastic remark was more difficult to process than its literal counterpart. However, when the context was supportive of the sarcastic interpretation (i.e., the character was known to be sarcastic), subsequent sarcastic remarks were as easy to read as literal equivalents, which would support the predictions of interactive accounts. Importantly, this effect was not preceded by a main effect of literality, which constitutes evidence against the predictions of modular accounts. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

The role of emoticons in sarcasm comprehension in younger and older adults: Evidence from an eye-tracking experiment.

We present an eye-tracking experiment examining moment-to-moment processes underlying the comprehension of emoticons. Younger (18-30) and older (65+) participants had their eye movements recorded while reading scenarios containing comments that were ambiguous between literal or sarcastic interpretations (e.g., But you're so quick though). Comments were accompanied by wink emoticons or full stops. Results showed that participants read earlier parts of the wink scenarios faster than those with full stops, but then spent more time reading the text surrounding the emoticon. Thus, readers moved more quickly to the end of the text when there was a device that may aid interpretation but then spent more time processing the conflict between the superficially positive nature of the comment and the tone implied by the emoticon. Interestingly, the wink increased the likelihood of a sarcastic interpretation in younger adults only, suggesting that perceiver-related factors play an important role in emoticon interpretation.