MIT Researchers Want to Understand the Language of Gifs

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then an expertly-executed reaction gif is worth, like a thousand words per millisecond. Harnessing the potency of a Jennifer Lawrence cringe and the sheer force of a NeNe Leakes side-eye in a way that’s innately shareable and easily understood. They convey not only an emotional state, but a nuanced, specific state in one tidy, economical package. In fact, gifs’ capacity to convey so much information in such a quick, culturally-specific manner inspired two graduates working at the MIT Media Lab to quantify their meaningfulness.

Travis Rich and Kevin Hu created a site, GIFGIF, that allows users to choose which of two gifs best represents a specific emotional response, like, say, “satisfaction” or “disgust.” The goal, as they explain on the site, is to “create a tool that lets people explore the world of gifs by the emotions they evoke.”

To that end, here’s a helpful set of gifs to describe some common, everyday emotional responses: