Emojis and autism
A while ago I found that I was somewhat addicted to emojis… I’d find myself wanting to add a smiley face at the end of emails to clients or even in a magazine article. And, of course, I used them liberally in social media posts or messaging. Weirdly, I also realised that I would pull the face that the emoji supposedly represented when I was in ‘add emoji at end of sentence’ mode.
Pulling faces to match the emotion of what I’m writing or illustrating is something I’ve always done, but I didn’t know until quite recently. Some people close to me commented on it a couple of times. “Why are you smiling?” or ‘Why are you looking so worried?” as I draw pictures of children celebrating or fretting about something. And then I realised that I did this all the time, even when in public (I just did it now, actually, while writing that – I pulled a kind of ‘oops’ face, the emoji with the wobbly mouth and one eyebrow up would’ve been the right one to insert here!).
The desire to add an emoji at the end of every post or message or article comes from my desire to get you, the reader of the post/message etc, to ‘get’ my intention. So the laughter emoji tells you I want you to laugh, I’m trying to be funny; the smile emoji tells you I want you to feel satisfied and happy with whatever I’ve just told you; the scrunched up eyes and downward mouth shows you that I’m frustrated or unhappy about whatever I just expressed. It’s interesting to me, though, that I now feel the need to add emojis in order for people to understand my intention. Aren’t my jokes funny enough in themselves that I can expect people to know they’re humour-based without adding a laughing emoji? (Don’t answer that! I think I’m funny… but I think that’s everyone, no? We all find our own sense of humour hilarious!)
I’ve read some articles about how autistic people aren’t able to decipher emojis like non-autistic folks. And, I have to admit, that has happened to me too. But honestly I’m not sure if it’s an autistic thing. The emoji with blushing cheeks for eg. I’ve had discussions with various people who have described it as the ‘smug’ emoji, the ‘embarrassed’ emoji and the ‘sweetly aware’ emoji. To me it looks like someone who’s happy but just isn’t shouting about it. A shy happy person. But it seems I’m alone in that interpretation.
I think emojis are actually an autistic-friendly tool. They not only allow us to clearly waymark our own writings/messages etc — this is a fun message, so I put a laughing-so-hard emoji!—but also to understand other people’s messages and the emotions that are behind them. With the written word it’s even easier to miss nuance or intention, because we don’t have the back-ups of tone, situation, body position, facial expression. For many autistics, however, communicating via message is actually ‘easier’ (as in less energy-sapping, easier to be expressive, gives you a chance to analyse before you respond etc). So emojis serve a wonderful purpose. They show us the emotion behind those written words without us having to guess.
I love emojis. And in finishing this, I’d really like to add a little happy emoji, maybe the one with the little tiny hands (which I interpret as being kind of like happy jazz hands mixed with a kind of happy ‘hi’ hand motion) or perhaps the smiling emoji with the star eyes, which I just like because it’s shiny and has stars in it… but I can’t, so you’ll just have to imagine them. Hopefully you can interpret the emotion without an emoji, just this once ;)
(Couldn’t resist a final wink!)
