Emotional blindness in digital communication: Do emojis really convey emotions?

ABSTRACT The rapid evolution of internet-based communication has fundamentally transformed human interaction, moving it from physical environments to digital platforms. This change led to the disappearance of nonverbal cues such as tone of voice, microexpressions, and facial expressions; this, in turn, resulted in the loss of elements that are an important means of communication in face-to-face interactions, giving rise to what can be interpreted as a "digital emotion blindness spot". In this study, the potential of emojis to bridge this emotional gap and convey "real" emotion will be examined from a cognitive psychology perspective. In this study, the neurocognitive mechanisms involved in the processing of pictograms are compared with those involved in the processing of real human facial expressions. As a result of analyzing some examples of interaction on social media (e.g., X, TikTok, Instagram), it can be observed that people perceive the emotion contained in a message more intensely when they see emojis. This high level of emotional interaction gives digital content more power and significance for the recipient; therefore, emojis can be considered a primitive form of body language in the digital world. The findings also show that emojis play an important role as "emotion regulators," but they do not completely eliminate ambiguities in text messaging. The present study in the end aspires to show that emotion blindness is related to the heterogeneity of cognitive justification mechanisms.