Emojis’ psychophysics: Measuring emotions in technology enhanced learning contexts

Emojis are pictorial representations of human facial expressions which are becoming particularly popular in computer-mediated communication. Within text-based messages, they function as surrogates of real nonverbal elements to convey emotional meanings, but in absence of a verbal label they can re-sult ambiguous. In addition, a quantification of how much positive and/or negative valence is expressed by different emojis is still missing. We asked to 110 adults to evaluate 81 emojis on two scales, relating to positive and negative valence. Through Rasch models, we quantified the amount of posi-tive and negative valence expressed by each emoji, deleting those emojis that were not scalable on the considered dimensions. This study is a preliminary step for the development of a set of scales formed by emojis representing discrete emotions, to be used in a variety of ways in psychological research as well as in learning contexts or for product evaluation purposes.