“Emoji, I can feel your pain” – Neural responses to facial and emoji expressions of pain

Abstract

The facial expression of pain is a universal social language that transcends cultures and societies. Gaining increasing popularity, emoji is now widely used to express emotional states during digital communication. Yet, it remains unclear whether emoji expression of pain can be processed as effectively as facial expression. This event-related brain potential (ERP) study investigates whether perception of pain expressions in emoji shares similarity with faces. Participants judged pain or neutral expressions in emoji and faces in a classic empathy paradigm. A dynamic convergent-divergent-convergent process was found during the observation of pain expressions. While the recognition for pain is better for faces than for emoji (both in accuracy and reaction time), we found similar P2 amplitudes during the early stage of processing and similar LPP amplitudes during later stage. Interestingly, the neural response diverges during P3 and N2 between faces and emoji: P3 respond more strongly to pain expression (relative to neutral) in faces, whereas N2 respond more strongly to pain expression (relative to neutral) in emoji. Our findings point to the commonality of perceiving pain in faces and in emoji, as well as the distinct salience of detecting pain in faces.