Emoji Intelligence= Emotional Intelligence
Emojis are becoming ubiquitous in communications. Can emojis address the complexity and nuances of human communications? Can we use them to express what we really feel and think? Learn what neuroscience tells us about personalization, dynamism, and context having a positive impact in emoji communication.
It is widely recognized that emotional intelligence is absolutely critical to success in our life, our work, our relationships.
Emotional intelligence being defined as “the ability to identify and manage your own emotions and the emotions of others”.
However, since we are all about emojis here, what about Emoji intelligence?
How can we use emojis intelligently- to communicate effectively, heighten empathy in relationships, and create better lives? How can we address the complexity and nuances of human communication with emojis?
I think we all agree that emotions are a just a plain fact of being human. We all have a need to express ourselves every single day is so many ways- happy, sad, angry, sleepy, etc. Can we get emojis to help us here, as text strips away much of the emotional context of communications?
“Most of us pay more attention to faces than we do to anything else,” according to the neuroscience of face perception.
“We know experimentally that people respond differently to faces than they do to other object categories.”
Scientists have discovered that when we look at an emoji online, the same very specific parts of the brain are activated as when we look at a real human face. Both the emotional inferior frontal gyrus and facial processing right fusiform react to an emoji.
Let’s use emoji intelligence to better the game in digital communications. Here’s how.
1. Use them in context
An emoji is to be used in context, knowing the nature of the audience or the person at the receiving end of the emoji. A facial wink or smile nuances text language, providing a crucial contextualisation cue, aiding our understanding of the spoken word.
A smiley face is universally understood. Right- audience?
Be careful about selecting an emoji that may confuse or be misunderstood by your audience.
Use an emoji in context with your text, the audience, and the intended message.
Sometimes you can intelligently do away with text completely. A smiley face can say it all. A more complex emoji “face with tears of joy” actually says it much better than any text can convey. So, one can use it in the context of expressing a simple, powerful emotion sans text.
Context also relates to time, place, culture, situation, right?Of course. A kimoji may not be suitable for business, a goodnight may not be suitable if someone is welcoming dawn in their country, a dumpling may not mean anything to someone not familiar with Chinese dumpling as a food item. Get my drift?
Speaking of context, let’s consider a technical or innovative aspect of context. If we create emojis with a background, we can add another aspect, a visual enhancement. If you see a shivering emoji against a snowy background, you realize the person is shivering due to a cold winter and not because he/she has a fever. This adds an additional layer of understanding or context.
2. Identify and Personalize
Psychology and cognitive neuroscience tells us that we are in our optimal behavior when we are able to best IDENTIFY with others — it could be your colleagues, partners, customers, family or groups or brands or even society.
We are talking about optimal emotional behavior. Because there are various elements at stake here — gender, culture, religion, politics, orientation, values etc. Once again, cognitive neuroscience clearly tells us that the key to most effective emotional behavior is human face and body language.
Emoji 2.O impart heightened personalization to emojis. Use them to create your persona and customize your communications. You can create your avatar or create a library of avatars- one for business, one for family, one for play etc–a face, hairstyle, an outfit, some accessories that mimic you and creates a digital self. Now you can communicate online with your personal face and style. This helps in the IDENTIFICATION and PERSONALIZATION. When combined with custom text, we are onto full blown SELF-EXPRESSION
I am taking the personalization emoji challenge and flowing with it. Let me create all my different personas. That will take some time. Ha Ha
3. Dynamism
Facial expressions and body movement dramatically stimulate the brain’s neural cortex, creating impressive engagement. Dynamism in emojis relate to animation or action- swinging a baseball bat, blowing a kiss, flipping a pancake, saying hello. Dynamic expressions and body movement combined with text can create a powerful punch, far beyond static emojis.
For example, if I can display an emoji of myself cooking and flipping a pancake, the audience will quickly engage with the action, our neurons start firing away similar to what happens when I am doing it in my kitchen.
Definitely richer imagery associated with dynamism. I think it also renders the emoji in a realistic way, huh? Facial expressions and movements imitate real life.
We are human and like our animation to be human-like. Dynamic images are more human to us.
While stickers and static images are great, I think the evolutionary leap in emoji expression is via dynamic 3D images.
More later. Stay tuned.
