Research suggests that participants who felt a higher sense of social presence enhanced their socio-emotional experience by using emoticons, such as smiley faces or sad faces. The emoticons express the non verbal cues that were missing from the interactions due to the decline in media richness. According to the media richness theory, communication richness is judged by the ablilty of the media to reporduce information sent through its channels (text, audio, audio-visual, face to face) with face-to-face as the most media rich mode of communication.