EMO-GLO: Cross-cultural differences in using graphic resources to express embodied emotions and pragmatic meanings in digital communication in a globalized society.

Non-verbal communication, or embodied action, has always been a challenge for computer-mediated communication since its beginnings, with emoticons only appearing in 1982 to disambiguate between humorous and serious message board posts. Nowadays, there are many resources users can draw from to make up for the lack of non-verbal cues. However, there is a mismatch between Unicode emoji descriptions and developers’ renditions of said emojis on different platforms, but also - because of globalization - differences in interpretations of those emojis in different cultures. With this pilot project we aim to investigate how the emojis that are supposed to reflect the six basic emotions: fear, joy, sadness, anger, surprise, and disgust are used for possibly different emotional and inferential meanings cross-culturally in Dutch, German, Italian and Chinese social media communication through a mixed method approach involving two studies, one qualitative and one quantitative which will cement collaboration between TSHD and TSB.