Scientific Method / Science & Exploration

Watch funny GIFs all day, for science!

Does a GIF's emotional variance impact how it's received?


Researchers at MIT are analyzing animated GIFs in an attempt to catalog what they believe to be a unique, Internet-based emotional vocabulary.

An animated GIF—these days often presented in the form of a "reaction GIF"—can make us laugh, but it can also help convey various other complex emotions, including anger, contempt, guilt, or even empathy in an environment that is frequently dominated by text. The advantage of communicating with GIFs, claim the authors of this research, is they can quickly and easily add context in a subtle way that text or emoticons cannot.


"When you are sent a reaction GIF, it takes only a few seconds for you to 'get it'," explains Rich. "GIFs convey emotions quickly and powerfully. GIFs are sent around on e-mail chains, included in news articles, and are at the core of huge Internet cultures. They are used to express every range of experience, from the joy of the perfect burrito to the heartache of a devastating breakup. So long as we say that language is the meaningful communication of information, GIFs are the alphabet of Internet culture.

"Maybe most importantly, GIFs bring an enhanced ability to empathize. Empathy is deeply lacking in many Internet cultures (as evidenced by the existence of hideous YouTube comments, for instance). GIFs trigger those primal mirror neurons that remind us there is a human on the other side of the connection."


There are currently more than 1,024 GIFs on the website, which might seem like a small number, but according to their website, they would rather have "1,000 well-characterized GIFs than 1,000,000 GIFs with only a single vote each." More images will be added automatically once enough votes have been collected to accurately sort the existing GIFs.



GIFGIF relies on Giphy's API to source their images, but choosing the emotions was a greater challenge, which the researchers explain on their website: "Emotions are tricky—and by no means a trivial (or even possible) thing to quantify. We seek to use emoticons that represent a 'core' or 'basic' emotion so we can understand the atomistic elements of what a gif is conveying... these are by no means definitive, correct, or absolute, but our goal is to make a GIF website—not solve the open questions of universal human emotions."

But what to do with all this data? Some fun ideas include converting a piece of text to GIFs, mapping an image (say, from a webcam) into a GIF, or even automatically parsing the emotion state of movies over time. A teacher of ESL (English as a Second Language) has even been using GIFGIF to teach at an art university in the US. The students are currently learning vocabulary for emotions, and their website makes visualizing the emotions alongside the text a breeze.

"Our more neuroscience-oriented friends have expressed interest in using this data for applications such as autism detection," Hu told "For example, in a clinical setting, by detecting when a user's submission deviates strongly from a stabilized, well-agreed upon result, we may be able to infer their inability to properly read other social interactions." Who knew these often silly and poorly looped images could have the potential to do so much good.


This story originally appeared on Wired UK.

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