Emoticons

Imediately following this discussion, my smileys seemed to have titles with them, now they do not. I had to resort to  punctuation, to select the sad face I wanted. Is it my tablet playing tricks on me, or were the emoticons labelled for a while? I can't do confused with punctuation, so I'll just say it.

it's a standard feature of this type of system so it wouldn't have been a conscious decision to include it.

Also, perhaps we can practice with them in safety? It does no harm to practice a little emotional expression in our chatter here on the forum.

:-)

Im not sure why it was considered helpful to provide emoticon features given that, as a people, we dont rely on facial communication. 

I did not realise the first was a wink. But, I have always used a wink to tell some people present that I was lying or teasing, in relation to my children, for example. Maybe this is a regional or generational thing.

I have looked again at the others and am still lacking inspiration. I get - happy, sad, surprised and laughing and love maybe, but I think top right has been watching too much TV.

It's a minefield, but I guess that here, many of us are in the same boat, and will give the benefit of the doubt, I hope.

I may be stating the obvious, and I have posted something like this before.

Emoticons epitomise the asperger problem with social communication. Neurotypicals (people not on the spectrum) supplement their social conversation with facial expressions and other body language. This allows two things to happen - it enables them to diversify the meanings of words - facial expressions provide an accent or perspective, or warn of a double meaning, or support humour. Secondly they allow NTs to abbreviate language, useful in social contexts, but especially when texting.

People on the spectrum don't seem to comprehend facial expressions, or don't look out for them, or are not fast enough at assimilating them. So we rely on spoken language alone, and usually we do not abbreviate - hence we are perceived as being too verbal or posh or pedantic.

NTs when texting find emoticons useful to create the same expressions as they would use to supplement real conversion, to say when they are joking, or using a double meaning, or addressing one person in particular etc etc.

I suspect that when we see emoticons we are little better at comprehending their purpose than we are of reading facial expressions.

I know I seldom use emoticons and find them awkward. Thing is I know what I meant to write in text. I'm not good at appreciating how it reads to others. So having failed to use emoticons to get round that, I get a load of flack I cannot comprehend.

I gues this is tough for some ASD people. I hadn't appreciated this but it's obvious really that if we have problems recognising emotion in peoples faces then we might also struggle with smileys.

Try

commons.wikimedia.org/.../Category:Smilies

for starters.

The three that you have used mean

winking, humorous, maybe suggesting a double entendre,

sick or sad

tongue out, joking

At least that's what they say to me but I don;t claim to be an expert. The exact meaning will be highly dependent on context just as the meaning of any given word or facial expression may hev multiple meanings and the particular use will depend on what someone has said in the run up to the expression.