In this project, we want to investigate how emojis change teenagers' understanding of social media messages, and how they relate to everyday communication. This study is online and open to teenagers based in the UK, aged 13-17 years old.
To take part, we need teenagers to have parent consent. Parents can view the information sheet and complete the consent form here.
Once you have parent consent, teenagers can complete the study here (note that you'll need to access code your parent is shown after they give their permission for you to take part!). Teenagers will need to complete the study on a laptop/computer.
If you are a young person thinking about taking psychology at University or at A-level, we've put some more details about our project below. We'd recommend looking at these after you've done the study though!
Thank you for taking part in our study! We know that some teenagers who take part might be thinking about pursuing psychology as a degree or A-level topic. Below is some information and questions that might be useful for personal statements or interviews in the future, if you wanted to talk about your experience taking part in psychology research!
We need lots of different skills to be effective communicators. This includes what we call “structural language skills”, like vocabulary and grammar. Good communication also includes "pragmatic language skills" – these skills relate to the social use of language, like knowing when someone is being sarcastic, not meaning what they say, or that you would speak differently to a teacher to the way you might do to a friend.
Of course we don’t just communicate face to face – we use social media to keep in touch with our friends. We don’t know how pragmatic language skills relate to social media message understanding. Emojis might be used to flag to our friends when we don’t literally mean what we say, like when we are being sarcastic – but maybe these messages are a bit harder to understand, or take us longer to understand.
In this study, we asked teenagers to self-report on what they think their own everyday communication skills are like. Our “Emoji task” then had three conditions, with three types of messages: messages with no emojis, messages with emojis that supported the written message (“congruent” trials), and messages with emojis that subvert the meaning of the written text (“incongruent” trials). We measured accuracy (how many people got right) but also reaction time (how quickly people answered).
Our plan is to test:
- How does message condition (no emoji, congruent and incongruent) affect accuracy and reaction time? Does it looks like the incongruent messages are harder/take longer?
- Does performance on the emoji task show any associations with pragmatic language skills (as measured by teenager self-report)?
If you’re a psychology GCSE/A-level student, here are a few questions you might like to think about!
- What other skills do you think people need when understanding social media messages?
- If we found significant effects of message type on reaction time but not accuracy, what might this suggest?
- If we found that fast and accurate responses in our emoji task were associated with better pragmatic language skills, what could this suggest (think about correlations and causations – what are the different explanations you can think of for this relationship?)
- Do you think we’d find different relationships/effects in older age groups? Why might this be?