Emoticons are becoming increasingly prevalent in our internet and social media strewn social landscape, but how effective are they at conveying emotion?

This point is often made by those who find these somewhat silly symbols pretty ludicrous, but their flaws may run a little deeper. While prolific in our culture, representing a smile with J may not effectively translate across cultures. This may seem odd given that an expression of happiness is universal across cultures, but new research seeks to balance the role of universal emotions amongst subtle cultural differences.

A group of researchers led by Dr. Kohske Takahashi conducted a series of experiments where they asked participants from Cameroon, Tanzania, and Japan to identify whether various emoticons were Happy or Sad. This included smiling and frowning faces but also more neutral visages. What is most interesting is that these experiments were conducted among a wide swath of people, including hunter-gatherers, farmers, and city dwellers, in an effort to see how the emotional recognition would vary by more than just country.

While the researchers did not test it, presumably the vast majority of American respondents would identify as representing happiness. This is likely due to our culture’s incredible saturation with emoticons, and they sought to test something similar by contrasting Japan, where emoticons are prolific, with Cameroon and Tanzania, where they are rare.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Japanese respondents were much more likely to identify emoticons than their African counterparts. What is a bit more surprising is that, among participants from Cameroon and Tanzania, city dwellers were no more likely to identify them than rural farmers, despite the frequent use of social media in those countries’ cities.

The researchers declined to make strong conclusions about that, as they did not control for prior familiarity with emoticons. While this may have helped resolve the question, they found similar results across variants of emoticons which included Western versions, such as :-), Japanese versions, such as (^_^), and more overt representations like . If the problem were simply a lack of familiarity, it is pretty safe to contend that the generic representation would still be more recognizable.

Instead, Dr. Takashi’s team concluded with deeper considerations. They argued that, despite the universality of emotional expressions, methods by which to convey those emotions are what vary. A depicted smiling face may not represent the sender’s emotion but instead could simply represent the idea of emotion. The distinction would stem from one’s familiarity with using emoticons to convey expression online, rather than a familiarity with just seeing them.

Alternatively, there are a host of other cultural barriers in online communication. Many keyboards have different signs of punctuation, and many languages are formatted on the page quite differently (such as with text moving right to left or up and down). Finally, because many cultures focus on different parts of the phase, the expression portrayed in simplistic emoticons loses a lot in translation.

But this study also conveys even deeper notions. Despite the promise of universal basic emotions, there remain huge cultural differences. While I could detect emotional expressions among American and Japanese counterparts, this may get much harder with those from Tanzania, as I am not familiar with the nation’s culture or its people.

Still, we want to be able to read people from all sorts of countries! This is why, in addition to a people reading workshop, Humintell prioritizes our efforts to train you in cross cultural communication by focusing on actual universal behaviors, not those conveyed by a keyboard.

Reading people is more than just gesture and expression. It also involves posture.

This blog tends to focus primarily on gestures and expressions, and we have delved only occasionally into the importance of posture in expressing or detecting various affective states. However, in a comprehensive review of research on nonverbal postures, Dr. Amy Cuddy and her fellow researchers detailed the persistent role of powerful postures in everyday interaction.

While a previous meta-analysis failed to find significant effects, Dr. Cuddy’s project dramatically expanded that dataset to better understand how postures can change an individual’s feeling of power.

This is a critically important topic to both social psychology and to efforts to study people’s thoughts and feelings. The feeling of personal importance, the authors maintain, has fundamental ramifications in understanding “what it is like to be a person” or in other words understanding how people really feel. The ramifications are endless both in deception detection (Is a person lying?) and in people reading (Is this person comfortable? Do they like me? Are they a threat?)

This study specifically looked at different postures that were either expansive or closed. Such postures involve more than just where the head was held but included questions of limb orientation, the openness of the chest and shoulders, and combinations of all of these factors.

After reviewing over fifty studies that examined this question, Dr. Cuddy’s team concluded that there was consistent support for the idea that certain postures led to greater feelings of power. The adoption of an expansive posture, with shoulders back and head up, for instance, is a strong expression of power, and this study helps support the contention that those exhibiting this pose tend to feel more powerful.

It is important to note the causal relationship identified here. Such postures are not necessarily a sign of such a feeling but lead to that underlying emotion. This does not attempt to determine why such postures are adopted to begin with, but it is still crucially important to reading people who showcase such a posture: if it leads to a certain emotion, they are probably feeling that while in that posture.

Similarly, interrogation and similar situations cannot be seen outside of the context of power. When a person feels powerless, they act in fundamentally different ways, especially with regard to the level of truth or insight into their emotions that they are trying to showcase. Hopefully further research delves into this important application.

Still, the fundamental association with postures and power will not be unknown to regular followers of this blog. For example, recall the discussion of triumphant poses by Olympic victors, and look at the illustration in that article. Doesn’t that look a great deal like an open posture? The head is thrown back, the arms are out wide, and the chest is thrust forward. Certainly such an individual feels very powerful indeed.

While more focus needs to be channeled into better understanding the role of postures in effective interpersonal communication, it is just one of many universal gestures and signs that help us know what other people are thinking. Many of Humintell’s training programs incorporate posture into a broader discussion of gestures, expressions, and even gait!

Learning how to read people extends beyond one on one conversation into the realm of politics and media studies.

A recent study published in Science has sought to analyze the ways in which such false stories get promoted and circulated throughout social media. While many news commentators have pointed to the role of automated bots in spreading such “fake news”, Dr. Soroush Vosoughi and his team found that it’s humans themselves that are most responsible for this phenomena.

They looked at the idea of “rumor cascades” by tracking news stories from their origin along a series of “retweets” or shares on Twitter. This allowed them to first look at the origin of a social media story but also the path that story took among its online audience.

Stories were distinguished between fact-checked and verified stories and those debunked as hoaxes and “fake news”. These consisted of many topics, including political stories about elections and urban legends, with political stories being the most commonly shared and analyzed.

The political nature of many of these stories seems quite relevant, as they spiked during particularly salient times such as the 2012 and 2016 elections.

Moreover, false and true stories diffused in markedly different ways. False stories spread much faster in all of the topic categories, reaching more people more quickly than true stories. In fact, controlling for many factors, the average false story was 70 percent more likely to be retweeted than the average true story. This was especially true for political stories.

So far, this has matched the media narratives that warn of the vast diffusion of false news stories, especially during the 2016 election. However, when the media points to the role of bots in promoting these stories, they begin to drift from the truth themselves.

Instead, when excluding bots from the analysis, Dr. Vosoughi and his team found identical results, suggesting that it was not bots but humans who were spreading false stories. Perhaps we have nobody to blame but our own human judgment and inability to properly detect deception. The notion of confirmation bias may be important here, as our brains tend to emphasize what supports our convictions.

The authors declined to offer a firm reason for why this would be the case, but they ruled out the possibility that particularly influential users were promoting false stories. Rather, they emphasized the role of novelty in resulting in assessments that the story was more important. If everyone has already heard a story on CNN, what point is there in sharing it?

In attempting to evaluate this hypothesis, they found that false stories were more generally novel and also that many users expressed surprise in their response. Yet, this is not the whole story, as these same users frequently also showcased reactions of disgust.

While a great deal of questions remain, the proliferation of false news stories emphasizes the applicability of lie detection and people reading in a broader political environment. While we cannot use the same lie detection skills that this blog has discussed at length, Humintell’s Dr. David Matsumoto’s advice is always relevant.