A pilot study of spontaneous facial mirroring of emoticons

Though an ever-increasing mode of communication, computer-mediated communication (CMC) faces challenges in its lack of paralinguistic cues, such as vocal tone and facial expression. Researchers suggest that emoticons fill the gap left by facial expression (Rezabek & Cochenour, 1998; Thompson & Foulger, 1996). The fMRI research of Yuasa, Saito, and Mukawa (2011b), in contrast, finds that viewing ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) emoticons (e.g., :), :( ) does not activate the same parts of the brain as does viewing facial expressions. In the current study, an online survey was conducted to investigate the effects of emoticons on perception of ambiguous sentences and users’ beliefs about the effects of and reasons for emoticon use. In the second stage of the study, eleven undergraduate students participated in an experiment to reveal facial mimicry responses to both faces and emoticons. Overall, the students produced more smiling than frowning gestures. Emoticons were found to elicit facial mimicry to a somewhat lesser degree than photographs of faces, while male and female participants differed in response to both ASCII emoticons and distractor images (photos of non-human, non-facial subjects used to prevent participants from immediately grasping the specific goal of the study). This pilot study suggests that emoticons, though not analogous to faces, affect viewers in ways similar to facial expression whilst also triggering other unique effects. Key Terms: emoticons; computer-mediated communication (CMC); facial mimicry; paralinguistic cues; gender; interaction; facial expression; facial action coding system (FACS); internet Introduction As reliance upon computer-mediated communication (CMC)—whether instant messaging, texting, email, or even Facebook—increases, it is becoming more important to understand how both language and paralanguage function in this new medium. The current study explores the The Arbutus Review Vol. 4, No. 1 (2013) 20 role of emoticons as paralinguistic markers, specifically insofar as they perform the role of facial expression in face-to-face (FTF) communication. During the rise of the Internet in the early 1980s, Internet users encountered difficulty conveying emotion, namely humour, in rapid, casual, textual interaction. As a solution to the problem, Scott Fahlman, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon, proposed the first two emoticons: 19-Sep-82 11:44 Scott E. Fahlman :-) From: Scott E. Fahlman I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers: :-) Read it sideways. Actually, it is probably more economical to mark things that are NOT jokes, given current trends. For this, use :-( (Fahlman, 1982) Emoticons have since become ubiquitous in CMC and are often assumed to be textual representations of the non-verbal cues displayed through facial expressions (Danet, Ruedenberg-Wright, & Rosenbaum-Tamari, 1997; Thompson & Foulger, 1996). In spite of this view, Dresner and Herring (2010) suggest in passing that emoticons do not behave exactly as do facial expressions, namely that viewers of emoticons do not mirror the emoticon expression as they would mirror a genuine facial expression. The current study addresses emoticons’ potential to trigger spontaneous facial mimicry (a viewer’s spontaneous recreation of facial muscular patterns observed in another face). Ultimately, this research strives to enrich our understanding of how emoticons impact the experience of CMC as a social and emotional environment through behavioural rather than textual