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Say it with a smile?

Social media is full of pitfalls, where understanding is concerned.  Face to face encounters with others involves a great deal of facial expression, hand gestures, body language. In short, emotion matters.   Our body language tells much more than the words we utter.

Of course, we can use emojis in our messages -  or we can add kisses, xx, after our abrupt response, softening the impact of, say, a disagreement.   There are a hundred and one ways of saying 'sorry', but how do you say it 'as if you mean it'?



See what I mean :) ?   I wasn't rude :) Do take care :)

Beware of negative emojis?  Negative emojis are more likely to be poorly processed.

A new study, published in the journal Computers in Human Behaviour,  now shows that men and women process emojis differently.  On the whole, it seems that women rate negative emojis to be more negative than do men  :(.  While positive emojis :) are about equally interpreted.

Some of us haven't got much further than using the old standard smiley face ":)".  But now people respond with hundreds of different kinds of emoji in an attempted substitute for body language.

We often see gifs being used for laughter in place of the old LOL.   Does that still mean laugh out loud?

Many emojis are used as pacifiers.  LOL is often used at the end of almost all phrases.  Know what I mean lol?  Or more expressively a heart.  They don't really mean to love you.  They are appealing to you? or are they? What are they doing?










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