Affective Profile Picture

Insufficient mutual understanding and limited social cues in remote workplaces can lead to misinterpreting text message tones from unfamiliar colleagues. We explored using facial expressions in profile pictures to convey socio-emotional cues. In an online experiment with 186 participants, we found that changing profile picture facial expressions influenced receivers’ impressions of the sender and message tone for neutral messages. Incongruent profile pictures with positive messages negatively impacted message interpretation, while negative messages were less affected. (Appeared in ACM CHI’23)