THE “NONVERBAL SURROGATES”: THE EFFECTS OF EMOJIS ON INTERPRETATION OF MESSAGES IN COMPUTER-MEDIATED COMMUNICATION

Abstract

Emojis, as a successor to emoticons, are also used by people to accommodate to the cue-deprived environment in computer-mediated communication. However, as being closer in resemblance to facial expressions and used more strategically, emojis could be more advanced than emoticons in functioning as “nonverbal surrogates” in CMC and bringing in social context cues such as affective information. Through the lens of Walther’s Social Information Processing model, this study aimed to investigate the effects of emojis on message interpretation in CMC and the chosen medium is WhatsApp, the most used social networking sites in Singapore. An experimental study (N = 161) which contained two parts found that emojis can function as nonverbal cues by complementing verbal messages with emotional information. However the effect tends to diminish when the verbal message becomes more complex due to overshadowing effect. Moreover, emojis can be used strategically and render messages interpretation of sarcasm. The implications of the findings were discussed and limitations as lessons learnt for future research were acknowledged.