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Verbal vs Non-Verbal Means of Expressing 

Emotion in CMC

Tatevik Kirakosyan
Yerevan State University

I
n the last decade there has been an enormous increase in computer-mediated

communication (CMC) 1. CMC includes a variety of electronic message and

conference systems, which can be supplemented by audio and video links. Computer-

based communication has become common in our daily lives, and this raises the question

of how different online communication is from face-to-face communication. Do we chat
in the same way in live interactions and via computers?

Nowadays one can hardly meet a friend or a colleague somewhere and ask for a

phone number, rather they will exchange e-mail addresses and chats, which makes  the

work more efficient. In addition, email and chat services also help us to maintain our

relationships with friends and colleagues in different locations. CMC can be synchronous
(e.g., chat) or asynchronous 2 (e.g., e-mail), and the messages are predominantly

typewritten (Adrianson 2001). More and more interactions take place via e-mail and chat,

privately as well as professionally. In other words, for most people today it is hard to

imagine themselves without a computer and without access to the Internet.

The aim of this article is to review whether communication of emotions is more

difficult in computer-mediated communication (CMC) than in face-to-face (F2F)
interaction by using certain verbal or non-verbal means of communication.

Emotion communication is defined as the recognition, expression and sharing of

emotions or moods between two or more individuals. As humans we experience differ-

ent types of emotions and feelings. Emotions determine the quality of our lives. They

occur in every relationship we care about. They can save our lives, but they can also

cause real damage. We don’t become emotional about everything. Emotions come and

go: we feel an emotion one moment and may not feel any emotion at another moment.

Some people are much more emotional than the others, but there are times when even the

most emotional do not feel any emotion.

The most common way in which emotions occur is when we sense, rightly or wrong-

ly, that something that seriously affects our welfare, for better or worse, is happening or

is about to happen. According to P. Ekman it is a simple idea but a central one - emotions

evolved to prepare us to deal quickly with the most vital events in our lives (Ekman

2003). 

Many philosophers distinguish between two types of emotion: episodes and emotion-

al states or dispositions. Philosophers call episodes occurrents when they refer to the
things which happen. Episodes may be short-lived 3 or long-lived. Philosophers often dis-

tinguish between occurrents and endurants. Occurrents happen, whereas endurants last,

endure. One type of endurant, if common sense is to be believed, is ordinary things and

persons. Another type of endurant is states. On one common view, states are a type of

continuant - they last. The category of states has often been applied to affective phenom-

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ena: someone can be in a state of sadness, in a mood or state of melancholy, despair, or

bliss. Moods as we know are states or frames of mind. The frequency of our emotional

episodes is another crucial feature in understanding an individual’s emotional profile.

How well we can control what we do and say and feel during an emotional episode is

also an important element in each individual’s emotional profile, while another aspect is

how clearly we signal others how we are feeling (Ekman 2003).

There is some confusion over whether emotions and feelings are the same thing. We

freely talk about how we feel when describing emotional states, and use the words inter-

changeably. An emotion is a state of awareness that gives people information about the

world, and a feeling is one’s conscious awareness of the emotion itself (Damasio 1994;

Mc Lauren 2010). When we say I feel anxious, angry, happy..., what we are really doing
is interpreting emotion by how it feels to your mind and body. These may refer either to

simple body sensations, such as hot, cold, pain, touch, etc., or they may be feelings asso-

ciated with emotions as for example love, hate, joy or anger. But what’s important to

remember is that emotions rarely occur singly, or in pure form. What we are reacting to

in the environment often changes quickly; what we remember and imagine about the sit-

uation may change; our appraising changes; and we may have affect-about-affect.

Typically, people experience a stream of emotional responses, not all the same ones. 

One of the functions of emotion is to focus our conscious awareness on the problem

at hand, the one that has triggered our emotions. Typically, our emotions do not operate

outside of our awareness, although that can also happen. 

Talking about past emotional experiences can also trigger emotions. We might tell the

very person with whom we had an emotional reaction about how we felt. Sometimes the sim-

ple act of talking about an emotional episode will cause us to re-experience the emotion all

over again, just as it happens when we conduct experiments and ask people to try to do so. It

is important to remember that emotional signals do not tell us their source. We may know

someone is angry without knowing exactly why. It could be anger at us, anger directed inward

at his or her self, or anger about something the person just remembered that has nothing to do

with us. Sometimes we can figure it out from our knowledge of the immediate context:

e.g. 

- God knows why such things should ever happen!
- I hesitate to say that I like this because how can I like something that

shows such pair?

Here we can obviously observe that the speaker is angry or, at least, not contented with

the message he had heard (in our case read) and this is seen in the context of his response. 

When comparing the way in which emotions are communicated in CMC and F2F, it

is crucial to consider the contextual differences in these two communication modes. The

most important feature that distinguishes both mediums and that is relevant for studying

the role of emotions is its different sociality or social presence. Although non-verbal cues

can indicate what general class of emotions a person is feeling, they typically do not

provide detailed information about that person’s emotional state.  By seeing that someone

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is crying, for instance, we might assume that s/he is sad; by the extent of sobbing we

might even be able to infer the intensity of the sadness.  But the tears in and off

themselves provide no information about the particular experience of sadness. The

cognitions that go along with the sadness or the circumstances that lead up to feeling sad

are as in the following example:

Oh, dear. Sorry to hear that.
God give him power to fight his disease.

Some authors claim that CMC is a cold and impersonal medium, where emotions are

very difficult to express. However, within the scope of this article we are making an

attempt to show that the difference between CMC and F2F in this regard is not great. For

this purpose we first distinguish between verbal and non-verbal means of online commu-

nication. As electronic language is a written text, it is divorced from gestures, facial

expressions, and prosodic features such as intonation, rhythm, and volume and these can

lead to the difficulty of  smooth and comfortable communication. Over the past several

decades, substantial progress has been made in understanding how emotions are

expressed through these non verbal mechanisms (Scherer & Ekman 1984; Fussell &

Glazer 2010).  Emoticons (or smileys) have entered cyberspace to provide the electron-

ic communication with emotional and human touch. An emoticon (a word coined from

emotion and icon) is a facial expression represented by a combination of punctuation
marks, letters or other characters, that viewed from the side resemble a facial expression

or, more rarely, gestures. So, CMC does not completely lack non-verbal information,

because it has its own version of non-verbal displays, namely emoticons or relational
icons, created with typographical symbols that resemble facial expressions (Walther &
D’Addario 2001). Emoticons can be considered a creative and visually salient way to add

expression to an otherwise strictly text-based form. In the same way as non-verbal cues

in F2F, emoticons also help to accentuate or emphasize a tone or meaning during

message creation and interpretation (Crystal 2001). Emoticons like any other emotional

word can be understood both in a positive and negative sense. The sad emoticon at the

end indicates that the message has a negative interpretation. Emoticons serve the function

of clarifying textual messages which is similar to non-verbal displays in F2F. 

Like other non-verbal means, emoticons can also supplement the verbal context as

well as express the significance independently. Besides adopting face-to-face communi-

cation methods, people communicate using extra-verbal methods, similar to non-verbal

communication but uniquely designed for an online environment.

One extra-verbal method in use is the deliberate use of capitalization. In online com-

munication, typing in all capital letters is the equivalent of screaming, that is used to

emphasize the emotionality of the messages, in place of “screaming caps”. For example,
BEAUTIFUL? !!!, IT’S AWSOME!!!!!!, SOO HANDSOME WOW!!!!, YOU LOOK
AMAZING!!!

Internet users also strategically use punctuation to get others’ attention and to empha-

size their emotional messages online. 

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e.g.  
- BEAUTIFUL!!! Was this little creature in your yard? ... and which

lens  did you  use???
-  ******* NICE, NICE, and, NICE.... 
- love you millions. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

In the above utterances, by using different punctuation marks, the speakers empha-

size their surprise, admiration and love.  

Verbal descriptions of emotional states can provide quite precise information about

the specific form of an emotion, such as anger, sadness, depression, or happiness that a

person is experiencing. Thus, whether it is easier to commuicate in F2F or CMC depends

on the person, character, etc. One thing is obvious, CMC makes it possible to find similar

others who share specific interests or emotional needs, and it is as convenient to share

emotions with these others as it is with friends in real life, resulting in the development

of new close and intimate relationships in CMC. Moreover, the findings with regard to

the success of internet suggest that the relative anonymity of CMC creates a safer

environment for some people to share emotions.

As in the case of F2F communication CMC  also is not devoid of the presence of

negative emotions. One form of negative emotion expression in CMC that has been

studied is uninhibited behavior, sometimes also referred to as “flaming”. Flaming has

been defined as the expression of strong opinions, accompanied by the display of

negative, antagonistic emotions in the form of insulting, swearing, offending, or hostile
comments (Glazer 2010).

Another means of expressing emotions through CMC is an interjection or the so-

called inarticulate exclamation. In the utterance Hoorrrraaayyy! The world is white
again! After one day without snow on the ground I was getting positively depressed that
I was not going to see it again for many months ahead... What a relief! an extreme hap-
piness and a state of relaxation is expressed, and in Wow, beautifully done! Great job
guys! we see tones of surprise. According to some dictionaries, interjections can encode
no more than an unspecified emotion, an emotion of any kind. For example, LDOTEL
describes the English oh as “an interjection used to express an emotion of surprise, pain
or desire”, and Webster describes the English ah as “an exclamation, expressive of pain,
surprise, pity, compassion, complaint, dislike, joy, exultation, etc. depending on the mat-

ter of utterance” (Wierzbicka 2003). 

Other interjections that the netspeakers use repeatedly are Yeah!!!!!!! to express relief
and excitement and OOPs!! to express remorse over a misunderstanding or missed dead-
line, etc. These interjections could have been inserted into a face-to-face conversation

with the same effect as they had in the online context. 

Of course, human emotions are not this simple. Each emotion can be accompanied by

different types of feelings. Important as these modalities are, however, paralinguistic and

non-verbal channels are insufficient for expressing the full range of human emotional expe-

riences for several reasons. First, although non-verbal cues can indicate what general class

of emotions a person is feeling, they typically do not provide detailed information about that

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person’s emotional state. By seeing that someone is crying, for instance, we might assume

that s/he is sad; by the extent of sobbing we might even be able to infer the intensity of the

sadness. But the tears in and off themselves provide no information about the particular

experience of sadness. In the example adduced below cognitions go along with the sadness:

First off, shame on you for using a child in such a horrible situation to boost your “likes”.
Secondly, prayer isn’t going to do anything for this child, donate some real money so the
parents can pay the hospital bills people. Quit talking to yourself and thinking that helps
people. And another thing, a like on fb is equal to a prayer!? That’s pretty damn sad.

So cute - we had to bury a hedgehog in September - it was so sad. Sad indeed... But
I hope you will find more of such friends, Allah bless him.

As we see verbal descriptions of emotional states can provide quite precise information

about the specific form of an emotion, such as anger, depression, or happiness, that a person is

experiencing. But interjections are not the only means to express emotiveness in the language. 

All languages provide speakers with an array of verbal strategies for conveying emo-

tions. In English, for example, we have an abundance of both literal (e.g., irked, angry,
furious), and figurative (e.g., flipping one’s lid, blow a gasket) expressions which can be
used to describe a theoretically infinite number of emotional states (Ekman 2003).

Emotions are always situational and cognitive, that’s why the choice of linguistic

functions always depends on a situation, taking into consideration the fact that there exist

at least two functions of expressing emotions: body language and the language of words.

In the process of cognition of the world surrounding us, people evaluate the facts and the

phenomena by expressing their own subjective attitude towards the reality, which, of

course, finds its reflection in the language.  These reflections are classified differently by

different scholars. D. Apresyan differentiates such categories as predicates of emotion, as

for example to be sad, metaphoric  predicates of emotions as in the case of stiffen, explic-
it expressions of predicate emotions as in sadness or to be sad, implicit ones, including
predicates of emotion with differentiated emotive syntactic expression, e.g. fool, and  the
emotive-expressives carrying emotive syntactic expression of an interjection like ah, oh,
oops, etc. Words expressing emotions of these lexical types can also be expressed by such
categories as nouns, adjectives and adverbs.

e.g.  

Beautiful!! Love you girl.... You know you are one of my oldest and
dearest friends..... God bless you...

Honestly I didn’t know what that means, i have to say because of copy-
write laws I did take that from a dark looking gentlemen not too long ago.

THANK YOU MY LOVELIES SOO MUCH!!!
Beauty!!!
Awesome! I love it and I am not even at a computer to hear it! Will

watch when I am !!! I LOVE the Chipmanks! Thanks Hasmik
Truly magical...nice photography
Absolutely! Your family really helped me out!

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As emotions are an indissoluble part of our lives, the investigation of expressive-emo-

tive speech acts with a definite illocutionary aim can be of great interest. 

In CMC we very often come across such emotions which contain an additional illo-

cutionary purpose to express desire, compliment, commands or reproaches, warning.

Speech acts of desire define positive atmosphere and create positive disposition and in

most cases stipulate the effectiveness of the interrelation between the participants of

communication.

e.g. 

Happy Birthday dear! Celebrate your life!!!
Happy New Year ooooooooooooooooooooooo my dear, my faithful, my

super puper, my gorgeous, my incredible, my unforgettable and sweet pro-
fessor i wish all your   dreams comes true, giant kisses and thanks for being
in our lives!

As for speech acts of compliment, it contains an emphatic purpose aiming at mention-

ing the positive features of the speaker.

e.g. 

- Wow, beautifully done! Great job.
- Hellen u r so beaitful especially around choclate the best food in the

world
- How nice she was! There’s freshness in her eyes... pretty and elegant!

Missing you always.

It is also worth mentioning that the speech acts of command or reproach serve to

make the speaker act more decisively. In most cases this type is not regarded as emotive,

but always realizes its pragmatic function:

e.g. 
- Dont you dare do that to your sister!
- A foolish idea! Not at all funny!! He should be behaved to the same way!!
- No sense of humors move on...that right there is awesome!!!

In on-line communication the speech act of warning is made with the purpose of

leading one’s thoughts and actions to the desired direction. The level of emotiveness in

this case depends on the subjective quality of the speaker, the situation and their attitude

towards each other.

e.g.   
- I am a nurse and from experience I warn families to promote HOS-

PICE.....Comfort is going to be the ultimate last experience we have with
our loved ones..........it allows us time to have “closure”.....TIME...IN A
PRODUCTIVE SINCABLE WAY...... 

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- This may be a joke but people really need to stop pictures like, espe-
cially dealing with children. Because its only giving the crazy people in
this world ideas on how to deal with their children. Guaranteed this pic-
ture is gonna get to the wrong sick mind...

The intentional nature of the speech act of reproach stands for expressing dissatisfac-

tion, disagreement or blaming. When using this emotive speech act the aim of the speak-

er is either to mention his attitude toward that situation or to show his/her dissatisfaction

about that situation.

e.g. 
- I’m still angry at you Whitney! I hate you cause I love you and always did!!!
- I hate this kind of things. That picture is over three years old, you stupids.

Reproach is used in both CMC and F2F interaction, and is considered to be a verbal

act, in some cases it contains tone of demand. From this point, it is filled with negative

emotivity (Bronnikova 2008).

Thus, it can be inferred from what has been mentioned that in communication we

must take into consideration informative function as well as verbal activity, as it creates

both positive and negative disposition.     

Words are not emotions, they are representations of emotions. We do need to be care-

ful because our words can mislead us about what our emotions are. The way we use

words sometimes can be confusing. We each experience the same emotions, but we all

experience them differently.

In conclusion, we can say that on the one hand emotions are reactions to matters that

seem to be very important to our welfare, and on the other, emotions often begin so quickly

that we are not aware of the processes in our mind that set them off. The expression of emo-

tion is an inseparable part of any society and from this point of view the investigation of

emotions in terms of different speech acts and other categories is of great importance.

Expressing emotions, even negative emotions, is natural. Channeled appropriately, they help

us move energy and take action. Only when they become habitual and destructive do they

lose their positive power and become an obstacle to our well-being. Because of the various

opinions on whether CMC is more or less personal than F2F communication, one must rec-

ognize that the personal or impersonal qualities of CMC are not inherent to the medium. And

one more thing: the personality and circumstances of the users must also be taken into

account when analyzing emotions either F2F or in CMC.

Notes:

1. Communication is a process of exchanging information, ideas, thoughts, feelings and

emotions through speech, signals, writing, or behavior. In communication process, a

sender encodes a message and then using a medium sends it to the receiver who

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decodes the message and after processing information, sends back appropriate feed-

back/reply using a medium.

2. Chatgroups are on-going discussions on a particular topic in which computer users can

take part in. The synchronous interaction takes place in real time (chats rooms) and the

asynchronous in the postponed time (e.g. bulletin boards, newsgroups, mailing lists).  

3. The word short-lived is, like the word tall, elliptic. To be tall is to be tall in com-
parison with some average or reference class. In affective science, episode is often
used to refer to processes or occurrents of relatively short duration. The relevant max-

imum period of time seems to be the period in between two periods of dreamless

sleep (Mulligan 1998).

References:

1. Adrianson, L. (2001) Gender and Computer - Mediated Communication. / Journal
Computers in Human Behavior. N17.

2. Bronnikova, E.G. (2008) Emotsional’nost’ i structura rechevogo akta v texte khudo-
jestvennogo proizvedeniya. Abakan: Irkutskiy gosudarstvenniy universtitet.

3. Crystal, D. (2002) Language and the Internet. Cambridge: CUP.
4. Ekman, P. (2003) Recognizing Faces and Feelings to Improve Communication and

Emotional Life. USA: First Owl Books.
5. Glazer, C. (2002) The Communication of Emotion in an On-Line Classroom. Austin: Texas.
6. Mulligan, K.; Scherer, K.R. (2012) Toward a Working Definition of Emotion. Vol. 4.

Switzerland: <er. sugepub.com>

7. Fussel, S.R. (2002) The Verbal Communication of Emotion. USA: Carnegie Melon
University Press.

8. Wierzbicka, A. (2003) Cross- Cultural Pragmatics. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
9. <Journals.obiolink.edu (ejc.)> 

10. <www.facebook.com>

11. <www. topface.com>

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