Affective Profile Pictures: Exploring the Effects of Changing Facial Expressions in Profile Pictures on Text-Based Communication

When receiving text messages from unacquainted colleagues in fully remote workplaces, insufficient mutual understanding and limited social cues can lead people to misinterpret the tone of the message and further influence their impression of remote colleagues. Emojis have been commonly used for supporting expressive communication; however, people seldom use emojis before they become acquainted with each other. Hence, we explored how changing facial expressions in profile pictures could be an alternative channel to communicate socio-emotional cues. By conducting an online controlled experiment with 186 participants, we established that changing facial expressions of profile pictures can influence the impression of the message receivers toward the sender and the message valence when receiving neutral messages. Furthermore, presenting incongruent profile pictures to positive messages negatively affected the interpretation of the message valence, but did not have much effect on negative messages. We discuss the implications of affective profile pictures in supporting text-based communication.