Do emoji enhance emotional processing of written language?
Despite the fact that emoji are a key part of everyday communication, little is known about the way they may relate to emotional processing of written language. The current study aimed to explore this issue, examining whether including an emotionally-congruent emoji onto emotionally-valenced words could enhance emotional processing. Participants completed a lexical decision task which varied the emotional valence of words (positive, negative, neutral). To each word an emoji was appended; these were either congruent to the valence of the word (e.g., positive word + positive emoji), incongruent (positive word + negative emoji) or a control (positive word + neutral emoji). Additionally, neutral words were accompanied by a positive, negative or neutral emoji. Response accuracy and latency were recorded. Regarding accuracy, no significant main effects or interactions were found for word valence or emoji valence. However, for latency, a main effect was found for word valence in which post-hoc analysis revealed that positive words were processed quicker than neutral words. However, the interaction between word and emoji valence was non-significant. This suggests that emoji may not provide an automatic processing advantage when used in written communication