A Psycholinguistic Study of Emoji as Digital Affective Tools: Cognitive, Social, and Emotional Impacts on Iraqi EFL Undergraduate Students
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.59992/IJSR.2026.v5n8p20Keywords:
Emoji, Psycholinguistics, CMC, Digital Affective Regulation, Iraqi StudentsAbstract
Digital communication lacks non-verbal cues, creating an "affective gap". These cues exclude essential nonverbal signals like voice tone and facial expressions, which frequently leads to unclear messages in online interactions Emojis have emerged to fill this gap.
Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) lacks the paralinguistic cues present in face-to-face interaction. This study investigates how Iraqi university students compensate for this absence using emoji on WhatsApp. Drawing on 200 WhatsApp message screenshots, this research employs an integrated theoretical framework combining Social Information Processing Theory (Walther,1992), Dresner and Herring’s Functional Model (2010), and Affective Regulation Theory (Gross,1998). The findings reveal that 41% of messages used compensatory tools. Of the 65 messages containing emoji, 58.5% served a cognitive function to disambiguate meaning, 32.3% served a social function to manage relationships, and 16.9% served an emotional function to express affect. The study concludes that for Iraqi students, emoji functions as a "Digital Affective Regulator" that simultaneously regulates cognition, social relations, and emotion. This positions emoji as a grammatically integrated component of digital language processing rather than mere decoration (Clark,1995).
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