Reference
Liegl, S., & Furtner, M. (2022). Quasi-Nonverbal Behaviors in the Digital Age: Who Even Uses Emoji. Presented at the 17th European Congress of Psychology, Ljubljana, Slovenia.
Publication type
Presentation at Scholarly Conference
Abstract
Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, advancing globalization and digitalization caused communication to shift from face-to-face interactions onto digital mediums, especially e-mail and chat messengers. The pandemic rapidly accelerated this process, producing a sudden need for society to fundamentally change the way they communicate dayto-day. The most prevalent digital mediums (i.e., e-mail and messenger services), however, are less broad and omit nonverbal behaviors, such as gestures and facial expressions. Quasi-nonverbal cues, such as Emoji, present an opportunity to counteract this absence of a nonverbal information channel and thus re-enrich conversations. They can act as social information and therefore allow for emotional contagion as well as direct inferences about their user’s characteristics. Yet, to assess the validity of these inferences, we need to identify the underlying traits predicting Emoji usage. Therefore, we explored which personality traits, according to the Big Five model, relate to heightened positive and negative Emoji usage in 237 participants. Moreover, we employed a scenario study to assess the impact of communicating with friends, family, colleagues or a date, respectively, on these general preferences. Depending on these contexts, we find distinct positive and negative influence patterns of participants’ agreeableness, extraversion, and conscientiousness on both reported and actual Emoji usage, while neuroticism only positively related to the general preference for negative Emoji and openness showed no association. Thus, we provide more detailed insights into the complex interrelations between interindividual traits and environmental factors that affect the prevalence of quasi-nonverbal behaviors in digital written communication.
Research
- Affective Signalling in the Digital Workplace
- FFF-Förderprojekt, January 2022 until December 2023 (finished)
Digitalization affected our globalized world for quite some time, posing increasingly wide-ranging affordances to individuals and organizations alike. Yet, the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted this ... more ...
- Emotional Leader Signalling in a Digital Age
- FFF-Förderprojekt, March 2022 until February 2023 (finished)
Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, advancing globalization and digitalization caused communication in organizations to shift from face-to-face interactions onto digital mediums, especially e-mail and ... more ...
Persons
Organizational Units
- Institute for Entrepreneurship
- Chair of Entrepreneurship and Leadership