Nowadays, regardless of gender, young and old, online chatting is indispensable for memes. These days, there are not hundreds of emojis that are embarrassed to come out and mix. Although everyone is using emojis, young people and middle-aged and elderly people are completely different in terms of painting style.
From the perspective of the use of emojis, the emojis used by young people often contain a variety of elements, and the emotions are more complex, and ambiguity may indeed occur in different contexts, while the emojis used by the elders focus on a straight and positive energy, and it is difficult to be mistaken.
And when two generations chat together with emojis, not only does the painting style have a feeling of "messing in", but also the understanding of emojis is often unexpected, focusing on a unique understanding.
The author made his own picture
The emojis sent by the elders often make young people feel a little embarrassed and cry and laugh, and the emojis that young people love to use are often too "abstract" and incomprehensible in the eyes of the elders.
In the past, we only knew that there was often a generation gap between the two generations in terms of concepts, but I didn't expect that now there is a generation gap even after posting an emoji, can this still be a happy chat?
So, why is there a generation gap between memes and emojis?
Maybe it's not you and me who are wrong, it's memes
To find the problem of the generation gap in the understanding of memes, perhaps we need to start from the origin of memes.
The original emoji was first designed and used by Scott Fahlman in 1982 and consisted of keyboard symbols, such as :-) to indicate a smile.
Emoji is a new generation of emojis, created by Japanese Shigetaka Kurita, in Japanese emoji is a compound of image and text, where e means image and moji means text. Compared to keyboard symbols, emojis can express certain meanings and emotions more vividly, such as:
Etc.
There may be an upper limit to emoji, but there is no limit to the creativity of netizens. Netizens who are keen on "Doutu" have gradually made some interesting chat atlases into complete sets of emojis, and social chat apps have made emojis a function of chatting, which is convenient for netizens to collect and send, so that everyone can happily chat with emojis.
As the saying goes, "a picture is worth a thousand words", theoretically, as long as you have enough emojis, you can even chat with others without typing and just posting love packets.
Psychologists have done a lot of research on foreign Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp and domestic social software such as Weibo and WeChat, and have concluded that emojis can be used as a supplement to text on the one hand, or even replace words to convey semantics, on the other hand, emojis can effectively express emotions.
In fact, it can be seen from the birth and evolution of the meme that it appeared from the beginning in order to express these two layers of information more vividly.
But psychologists, like us, have found that memes are sometimes not a panacea, because people will always interpret a meme with their own unique understanding, so ambiguity can arise when chatting.
A study by the University of Minnesota compared the extent to which 304 volunteers misunderstood the same emoji on different mobile platforms, and found that some emojis were misunderstood, with varying degrees of difference between the sender and receiver.
For example, the word "surprised" may be interpreted by some people as "blushing" or "embarrassed".
图|不同 emoji 在语义和情绪理解的歧义对比(Miller et al., 2016)
A study done on WeChat found that when text is added to a sticker or emoji, the message is clearer and more complete.
Therefore, sometimes when the other party does not understand or misunderstand the emoji or emoji you send, it may not be the two of you who are wrong, but the emoji itself is prone to ambiguity, and it may be better to match it with some text.
Age differences in meme comprehension
There is a Zen saying in the mainland: look at the mountain is a mountain, look at the mountain is not a mountain, look at the mountain is still a mountain. Now it mostly means that there will be different perceptions and understandings of things at different stages of life. From a psychological point of view, the same seems to be true for the understanding of memes.
A cross-cultural psychology study recruited 523 volunteers from the UK and China, ranging in age from 18 to 84, with an average age of around 36. The researchers used an emoji classification task to test their correct understanding of expressions, in which they were provided with six types of expressions from 4 commonly used system platforms (Apple, Android, computer, and WeChat), and they needed to find suitable naming labels for these expressions, a total of 6 types: happiness, sadness, anger, surprise, fear, and disgust, as shown in the figure below.
Figure: 6 types of emotional emojis on 4 platforms (Chen et al., 2024)
It was found that for the 4 emotional emojis of surprise, fear, sadness, and anger, the older the volunteers were, the lower the recognition accuracy.
For example, older adults may mistake "fear" for "sadness" or "disgust", "surprise" for "fear," and so on.
And for such a phenomenon, psychologists have proposed two possible explanations.
1
Shifts in cognitive abilities and strategies
Netizens often joke that "sure enough, the brain is still new and easy to use!", which makes some sense from the perspective of cognitive development. As we grow older, our cognitive function will decline to a certain extent, which leads to the fact that middle-aged and elderly people are relatively slow to understand and accept the ever-changing emojis, not to mention that young people are always at the forefront of the emoji trend, and it is no wonder that the elders can't keep up.
In addition, there are psychological studies that have found that age affects the cognitive strategies a person adopts. Young people are more inclined to adopt exploratory strategies and like to be exposed to and use new things, while as they get older, people are more likely to turn to utilitarian strategies, which makes them more likely to rely on existing knowledge and experience rather than accept new things easily.
Therefore, older people are more receptive to new things when they see the obvious benefits of them, for example, when parents find that new memes can bring them closer to their children, parents may be more willing to take the initiative to understand and use them.
2
Low self-efficacy in meme comprehension
Self-efficacy refers to a person's self-confidence or belief in whether they can accomplish a certain behavior or achieve a certain goal. When a person's self-efficacy is high, they will believe that they are capable of coping with new challenges, and on the contrary, they will adopt a conservative attitude of avoidance and fear of new challenges.
Psychological studies have shown that when a person's self-efficacy for new things is high, even middle-aged and older people do not have a significant difference in understanding emoji with young people.
However, the development speed of the Internet in mainland China is also extremely fast in the world, and middle-aged and elderly people are relatively unfamiliar with new things on the Internet, and their self-efficacy is generally low, and the meaning of emojis used by young people is often ambiguous and more indirect, such as crazy literary emojis, etc., which may make it difficult for middle-aged and elderly people to confidently incorporate new emojis into their communication system, because they are afraid that they will not understand it correctly and lead to being despised by young people, or make the scene embarrassing.
All in all, there is indeed a generation gap in the use of emojis, but this does not necessarily make it impossible for young people and elders to communicate happily, if we can give more patience and tolerance, so that they have enough time to learn new memes, and help elders understand the meaning of memes, middle-aged and elderly people can also keep up with the trend of young people's memes.
bibliography
[1] Miller, H., Thebault-Spieker, J., Chang, S., Johnson, I., Terveen, L., & Hecht, B. (2016). “Blissfully happy” or “ready tofight”: Varying interpretations of emoji. In Proceedings of the international AAAI conference on web and social media (Vol. 10, No. 1, pp. 259-268).
[2] Chen, Y., Yang, X., Howman, H., & Filik, R. (2024). Individual differences in emoji comprehension: Gender, age, and culture. Plos one, 19(2), e0297379.
[3] Boutet, I., Goulet-Pelletier, J. C., Sutera, E., & Meinhardt-Injac, B. (2024). Are older adults adapting to new forms of communication? A study on emoji adoption across the adult lifespan. Computers in Human Behavior Reports, 100379.
Planning and production
Author丨 ACC Psychology Science Popularization Author
Audit丨Yang Xiaoyang is an associate professor at the School of Psychology, Sichuan Normal University
Planning丨Ding Kun
Editor丨Ding Kun
Reviewer丨Xu Lai Linlin