Tibits: Smiley

Smiley, smiley face, or happy face, (☺/☻) is a stylized representation of a smiling human face, commonly occurring in popular culture.  In today’s world, where a large chunk of communication is being carried out through a digital medium, reading another persons emotions is not so simple. Psychologists state that 90% of communication between humans is non-verbal. Non-verbal communication is composed of gestures, facial expressions, distance between communicators, hand signals and everything that we notice that is not verbally communicated.
The psychology of smileys goes even deeper. The use of which smiley is being used is extremely deep. The particular smiley that one selects has a, for them, the best illustration of what they are trying to express. Why then is one smiley face better than the other? And in a similar situation, would the same smiley face be selected by different authors. The questions to these answers are currently being sought by psychologists but definitely gives us something to think about the next time we choose to place a smiley face or emoticon in our web conversations.