Emoticons and Smileys as a Way of Expressing Emotions in Nonverbal Interpersonal Communication

Emoticons and smileys, which are a product of the digitization of language over the last decades, help in expressing moods and emotions in written communication, that over the Internet in particular, which in direct face-to-face communication interlocutors signal with their gestures, facial expressions and voice. Therefore, emoticons and smileys are a kind of shorthand used mostly by the youth in two prevalent forms of written texts, i.e. e-mails and text messages