Sveiki everyone!

This week was a fun week in rhetoric and media studies class! Some classmates were paired up and given the same, very simple conversation, which each of the pairs had to act out with the use of different social cues. They basically had to act out the same conversation in different ways (in a bar, after a divorce, as two random strangers, etc), while the rest of the class had to guess what situation they were reenacting based on the social cues. We were generally able to tell apart the general emotion of each situation based on posture, smile, intonation, etc.

This made me remember an article I had read a while back on emotions as a universal language. A professor at UCL had conducted a study on this matter, in which she eventually proved that there are 6 basic emotions that are the most easily recognizable: anger, fear, disgust, amusement, sadness and surprise. This made me think about how much easier it would be to make genuine friends if those were the only emotions we had and were capable of expressing. However, even with the capability of cross-culturally recognizing certain emotions, we still can run into some confusions.

These confusions can arise from something as simple as an emoji misinterpretation. I had assumed that they have the same or similar meaning worldwide, but turns out that is not the case. After listening to this podcast, I found out that emojis I had already been using in assumption that I knew their meaning, like the angry face with smoke coming out of its’ nose , had different meanings entirely. This emoji, for example, in reality (in China) is meant to symbolize something triumphant, while I had been using it to express extreme anger and frustration.

Emojis are like an alphabet, there are so many of them and with emotions it is similar, there are tons. Does it really come down to only 6 base emotions that we can communicate cross-culturally? If that is a fact, then do we even have emojis for these 6 emotions that are understood to mean these same emotions worldwide?