Let’s face it: there only so much emotion an emoticon can convey. Those little combinations of characters – a colon and a closed parenthesis for a sideways smile, for example – are a tad limiting if you’re hoping to convey real emotion in your e-mail message.

While many Web services companies have attempted to offer a slightly better collection of emoticons, Facebook (News - Alert) is the first one to involve real behavioral science in their creation of new and better ones.

“This all began [when] we were looking at the kind of issues people were reporting to Facebook," Facebook engineer Arturo Bejar told Popular Science. "The reports had to do with things Facebook didn’t need to act on, but things people should address – what should happen when you say something that’s upsetting to me or put up a photo I didn’t like?"

To improve the range of emoticons Facebook offers, the company invited Dacher Keltner, a psychology professor at UC Berkeley who studies emotions and social interaction, to work with the social media company, "getting people to be kinder and more polite to make for more compassionate communication," Keltner said.

While emoticons may seem frivolous and largely the provenance of teenage communications, they do actually serve a purpose. They can “lighten up” criticism over e-mail or social media, or flag a comment as tongue-in-cheek. E-mail and text are very impersonal methods of communication: without the ability to hear voice inflection, recipients of texts and e-mails can sometimes misconstrue what’s intended to be humorous or lighthearted as anger or serious criticism.

While most emoticons can only convey a wink, a smile or a frown, a behavior science-based range of emoticons could help convey more subtle emotions, such as compassion, understanding or disapproval. For Facebook, which is often the canvas on which interpersonal conflicts and misunderstandings are displayed, this is a valuable tool to help people communicate better.

"There’s all this communication that happens when you’re talking to someone face-to-face – you can see that they're nodding and you can see their smile – that is not present when you’re communicating electronically," said Bejar. "One of the questions that we asked was, 'Wouldn’t it be great if we had a better emoticon that was informed by science?'"