Ulysse Sabbagh

Yet Keltner thought that by incorporating some of the principles from Darwin’s seminal work on emotion, he could add a touch of the richness he felt existing emoticons lacked. “I’m naïve about emoticons because I’ve never sent one in my life, but I’ve looked at them–it’s just missing a lot of important things in our emotional lives,” Keltner says.

Sympathy, for example, can be hard to really get across in traditional emoticon form. “It’s an under-appreciated emotion in Western culture,” Keltner explains. “We now know what it looks like and sounds like because of science. They created this dynamic emoticon that when you see it, it’s really powerful.”

Yes, they’re called emojis and they have been around for quite some time now. Not that I don’t think this is a good idea, but the amount of press Facebook/Path stickers have received is irritating when you think that no one ever mentioned emojis.