Media explorer offers insights into online humor, digital emotion, emojis, memes and more

On World Emoji Day — Thursday, July 17, Professor of Psychology at Chatham University will examine and interpret meanings and emojis in various digital and social media formats.
 

— Dr. Monica Riordan is an expert in computer-mediated communication, focusing on how people convey and interpret meaning in digital formats such as text messages, emails, and social media.

Her research examines the use of emojis, GIFs, memes, nonstandard punctuation, phonetic spellings, and the like as tools for expressing emotion. She additionally explores how these cues affect social perceptions in online interactions, including warmth, competence, need, and sincerity. 

Among the topics Dr. Riordan can address include:

· Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC): She investigates how individuals create and interpret meaning in digital communication such as text messages, emails, and blog posts, focusing on the challenges posed by the absence of traditional contextual cues.

· Digital paralinguistic cues: Her research delves into the use of emojis, GIFs, nonstandard punctuation (e.g., “?!?”), and phonetic spellings (e.g., “gasp,” “ooooohhhh”) as tools for expressing oneself in online communication. 

· Digital emotion expression and interpretation: Dr. Riordan examines how emotions are conveyed and interpreted in computer-mediated environments, exploring the effectiveness of various verbal, typographical, and stylistic cues in conveying affective states. 

·  Impact of digital cues on social perception: Her work includes exploring how the use of digital cues in professional settings, such as workplace emails and chats, influence perceptions of leadership and work team relationships.

· Online humor: Dr. Riordan explores the role of memes, reaction GIFs, verbal irony, and a range of paralinguistic cues in the creation and spread of online humor, and its use to enhance a sense of connection and belonging, establish group identity and social norms, and engage people in social critique. 

· Alignment and accommodation: Her work explores alignment and accommodation, meaning the ways people adjust their speech, tone, word choice, and nonverbal behaviors to either converge (become more similar) or diverge (become more different) from their conversational partner. People accommodate to show empathy, build rapport, increase understanding, reduce social distance, or sometimes to assert dominance or independence.

Dr. Monica Riordan biography

Monica A. Riordan is a Professor of Psychology at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, PA. She holds a Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology with a concentration in Cognition from The University of Memphis. Her research focuses on computer-mediated communication, particularly in how affective and social meaning is constructed between interlocuters using email, text messages, or chats. Dr. Riordan has authored or co-authored a number of papers in journals such as Computers in Human Behavior, Human Communication Research, Journal of Language and Social Psychology, and Discourse Processes. Keep up with her work at drmonicariordan.com.