“Irony is easy to understand ”: The role of emoji in irony detection

In face-to-face conversations, interlocutors might recognize the ironic intent of a speaker relying on the incongruity of the comment relative to a situation, and on irony markers such as the ironic tone of voice and specific facial expressions. In instant messaging, acoustical and visual cues are typically absent, and the context is not always shared. We investigated the role of emoji as cues to detect irony, hypothesizing that they might play the role of the conversational context. We administered to 156 Italian adults a questionnaire, presenting them with WhatsApp messages followed by an emoji, which was congruent or incongruent with the (non-)evaluative positive or negative comment, and found that evaluative incongruent items were rated as more ironic, and that incongruent positive messages were more easily recognized as ironic (criticisms) compared to incongruent negative messages (ironic compliments), in line with the asymmetry of affect hypothesis.