Emotional processing of emoji
Do emoji help us process words?
This research found that when pairing a happy emoji to a happy word, this does not help us process the word any more efficiently than without an emoji or with one which is opposite in sentiment to the word. This suggests that emoji are not interpreted automatically as emotional
Do we embody emoji in physical space?
We often embody emotion in physical space ("Feeling up"). If emoji are emotional, we should see effects when these are displayed within our physical world. When we report the level of emotionality of emoji, we see that happy emoji are rated more positive when in upper vertical space and sad emoji are more negative when in lower space. However, this only seems to be the case when we explicitly report the valence of emoji and not how we implicitly embody them.
Do we see any cross-modal effects when processing emoji?
Cross-modal processing refers to the way we integrate information from more than one sense at once (e.g., visual and aural information). If emoji are emotional, we should see that positive emoji should be easier to process with aural information which tends to be embodied more positively (e.g higher pitch) and negative emoji with aural information which is embodied more negatively (e.g., lower pitch).