Specifically, face emojis were rated as more familiar and more frequently used than emojis in all the other categories (non-face emojis). Although there were also small differences between some types of non-face emojis (emojis in the symbol category showed higher ratings than the other categories), the use/knowledge of face emojis clearly stands out from the others. These findings suggest that face emojis are more typically used in communicative interactions than non-face emojis.
Several different emoji have been pressed into service to highlight insincere or snarky remarks. Unicode officially adopts emoji, adding hundreds more—like cat faces emoting happiness, anger, and tears. If someone texted something that could be seen as mean, then an emoji would help make it seem friendlier. She went on to tell me she sends an emoji of a rocket ship next to a heart when she wants to “send love” to her friends.
When Shouldn’t You Use Emojis At Work?
A series of linear mixed-effects models were conducted to examine whether perceived partner responsiveness predicted likability, closeness, and relationship satisfaction, while accounting for random intercepts by emoji presence. We appreciate the attention to detail and have included more recent studies across domains that become the main focus of this manuscript (i.e., attachment theory and emotional intelligence). To elaborate on and render justice to attachment theory and gendered communication patterns, we still elected to keep and add several, more foundational studies for a well-rounded background review. The guiding principle being that early parent–child bonding experiences form basic relational patterns that manifest themselves, later in life, in other relationships.
In sum, HCI researchers have delved into solutions and experimented with diverse systems to support and examine the effectiveness of communicating emotions through emojis. Consequently, our goal is to investigate how emojis have been employed to facilitate this purpose over the past years. By conducting a systematic literature review, we aim to delineate the solutions, insights, and recommendations that emojis have already provided and could offer to advance CMC communication further. Platforms like Slack and other internal messaging tools make it easy to use emojis, whether you’re reacting to a message or adding a bit of personality to a conversation. They can help lighten the tone and make quick exchanges feel more natural.
In these moments, sincere words and empathy are far more impactful than any pictogram. Reserve ‘🙏’ (Folded Hands) for genuine expressions of gratitude or prayer, rather than a casual ‘thank you’. Emojis shine brightest in informal settings and when you want to inject personality or clarity into your message. However, judging from the number of web pages devoted to the topic of “confusing emoji,” it seems that these symbols often create ambiguity instead of reducing it. Interestingly, men and women also showed different associations between emoji use and personality. Moreover, the scientists assessed different aspects of personality in the volunteers using questionnaires.
The results across all three moderation analyses indicate that participants’ gender did not moderate the relationship between emoji use and perceived likability, closeness, or relationship satisfaction. While emoji use itself has significant effects on these relationship perceptions, gender did not influence these associations. Perceived partner responsiveness is a key determinant of relationship satisfaction, as it fosters intimacy 83 and enhances marital satisfaction 26.
2 Examining Gender Differences In Emoji Use Frequency Across Relationship Types (hypothesis 2; Partly Supported)
In another study, Hong et al. (Hong et al., 2024) presented a keyboard interface using query expansion and emoji prediction to better suggest emojis for users. Lastly, Gao et al. (Gao et al., 2020) introduced a similar model for sticker recommendation, learning representations without labels and considering context across multiple turns of dialog. The model achieved state-of-the-art performance across all metrics and paved the way for a personalized sticker response selection system. One thing that people commonly notice when texting is that there are huge differences among people regarding Emoji use.
Allowing users to use emojis to quickly react to other users’ stories, as well as the choices of these emotions, proves that the future of emojis relies profoundly on how these platforms promote, curate, and trigger certain emotions. Future research should explore the consequences of this increasing partitioning and divergence of emojis across operative systems, platforms, and devices, as the choices will shape users’ communication in the long term. The corpus shows that emoji research has supported users’ ability to create more personal, interpretable, and effective communications. The articles explore different levels of expressiveness over a broad range of emotions.
To account for the contextual factors influencing emoji interpretation 69, participants were instructed to imagine exchanging messages with their close friends. The corpus shows that emojis have evolved from text-messaging icons to more complex multimodal forms. These modalities include AR/VR/MR, biosignals, haptics, and speech bubble form. These subthemes have little to do with emoji as Unicode-based icons, and more to do with the role in which emoji plays as a nonverbal communicative marker of emotion. Notably, the identified articles frequently made direct comparisons to or cited emojis as inspiration for the emotion communication systems presented. In this way, we posit that the articles discussed represent the next step in the evolution of emojis for emotion communication.
In this study, we explored how the HCI literature has addressed the evolution of emojis for communicating emotions. After identifying 42 papers that examined, employed, and extended the use of emojis, we identified relevant themes that described how emojis’ affordances, design, and capabilities have evolved over the past decade. These articles have introduced new ways for users to communicate their emotions through emojis, which have been constantly reshaped over the past years. I am currently very interested on emojis because of their potential capacity to express emotions and because of their widespread use in computed-mediated communication.
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- Further studies confirmed this advantage but emphasized it for certain emojis, primarily disgust and sadness.
- While in face-to-face (F2F) communication individuals can employ nonverbal cues that significantly contribute to the understanding of their message, such as facial, tonal, and physical expressions, those elements are missing in online communication.
- The divergence in emoji research reflects a broader trend in the field of CMC technologies, where new tools and social platforms continually emerge and perish, each with unique features and designs.
This challenges the notion that facial or highly expressive emojis are more effective than non-face or less expressive emojis and implies that even simple or abstract emojis can fulfill relational functions in digital communication. The results indicate that the mechanism enhancing relationship perceptions operates independently of emoji type, provided the emoji contributes to an emotionally coherent message. The results across all three moderation analyses indicate that participants’ self-reported frequency of emoji use did not moderate the relationship between emoji use and perceived likability, closeness, or relationship satisfaction. While emoji use itself has significant effects on likability and relationship satisfaction, the frequency with which participants reported using emojis in their daily communication did not influence these relationships.
By distinguishing between face and non-face emojis, this study highlights the nuanced role of these visual cues in shaping perceptions of partner responsiveness and further relational outcomes. As simple pictorial and ready-made cues, emojis can contribute to and even enhance relational perceptions by efficiently conveying emotional nuances and nonverbal signals, fostering deeper emotional connections in digital interactions. As such, possessing higher EI in CMC contexts may be advantageous for understanding and managing CMC-based social interactions.
As such, it contributes to the growing literature on CMC, emoji use, and individual characteristics. It also provides novel insights into who may use emojis more frequently, as well as with whom and in what relational context. Finally, our work opens new research avenues at the intersections of psychology, CMC, and the study of attachment and emotional intelligence. We conducted a systematic literature review to study how HCI researchers have examined emojis to communicate emotions in the past 10 years. After identifying 42 articles, we found several themes motivated by both purpose and method, with the purpose of improving the search and selection of emojis, as well as enhancing emojis to provide new communicative affordances in a distinct manner. The literature provides different methods and systems that include improving recommendations, input selection, and emojis themselves.
We then removed 120 duplicates using the articles’ DOIs, resulting in 1,149 articles. It has also been reported that women use emojis more often than men, and that women—perhaps through their familiarity and more frequent use—perceive emojis as clear methods of communication. To make the most out of your emoji-talking experience, you need to remember some rules. First, you need to avoid using emojis without context – particular symbols that look like parts of the human body actually mean those parts.
Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process. Participants self-reported age, gender, race/ethnicity, education level, sexual orientation, and relationship status. Whether you’re messaging your colleague or emailing your manager, let’s explore some situations where it’s usually okay to use emojis at work. As the lines start to blur between using emojis in formal and informal conversations, it’s becoming more important to understand when and how to use emojis in a work environment.
They offer ways to reflect different genders and skin tones, acknowledge neurodiversity and show cultural awareness in everyday interactions. Genuine reactions of happiness, frustration or laughter can help you connect with recipients in a business setting and even reveal a bit of vulnerability. Communication that feels too formal or stiff can be off-putting to customers, vendors and co-workers. Emojis can help soften that tone, making messages feel more approachable and human. The 🙏 emoji is widely used in Western countries to mean “please” or “thank you,” but it represents a specifically spiritual gesture in many Asian cultures. Similarly, the ☪️, ✡️, and ✝️ symbols should be used thoughtfully and never in a joking context.
A significant percentage of people report being confused by others’ emoji use. Based on it, we decided to explore whether emotional intelligence moderated the link between attachment style and emoji use. While the results were non-significant, the value of null results should not be underestimated. In some cases, using emojis in your external communications can enhance the appeal of your messages and make your brand more relatable. In summary, we found that emoji research has led users towards emotion communication that is similar to F2F communication. The new channels of communication are marked by ambiguity, interpretability, and personalization, characteristics shared by F2F communication.
The first thing you need to remember about emojis is that if they look slightly like a human body part, it means that they are used exactly to describe this part. But now you understand that the eggplant or peach emojis (🍆 and 🍑) mean exactly what you thought they did. These are the most significant benefits and drawbacks of using such images in your private messages. And now that you know the emoji meaning and benefits, it is time to learn some significant and essential rules that will come in handy in your next conversation.
MTurk workers aged 18 or older who reside in the United States were invited to participate via a brief description posted on the MTurk platform from August 28th, 2024 to August 31st, 2024. Interested participants were directed to a Qualtrics survey, where they read and electronically provided written informed consent. The recruitment process took place exclusively during this period, and all participants provided written consent before starting the study. Given the potential for both help and harm, how can we use emojis more mindfully and effectively? PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.
Face emojis primarily express emotions, while non-face emojis are often used to convey implicit textual meanings 49. Moreover, the two types of emojis differ significantly in how they are interpreted and understood 50. They are powerful tools with the potential to significantly enhance digital communication by adding emotional context and building rapport when used thoughtfully and appropriately. They can make text feel less cold, clarify tone, and increase engagement. Among the main issues in this paper is apparently in the narrative of correlation being “relation”, “associations”, then -correctly- “correlations”, but at the end becoming generalized statements. Based on this comment, we have made the decision to cut the Big Five from our paper entirely.
Knowing when to use emojis—and when to avoid them—can make a big difference in how your message is received. For example, people often use emojis to signal that their message is intended sarcastically. But the Unicode Consortium doesn’t dictate meaning—there is no “sarcasm” emoji—and, as a result, people are left to their own devices to Catherine Pass post about Datingsmatch make this clear. Lastly, the finalized messages were inserted into the chat interface of a popular mobile dating application. In order to avoid confounding effects due to the name, gender, or profile icon of the fictitious dating partner, these elements were blinded in the final screenshots (Fig. 1).
Looking at the findings, there was a high level of agreement in the dataset with regard to the emotions and meanings communicated by emojis. However, familiarity and frequency of use scores were relatively low, meaning that it appears that people tend to use a rather limited number of emojis in everyday life. First, they can help you easily share your thoughts and feelings about a particular situation.
We present our results, which indicate that emojis’ designs and purposes have drastically changed over time, as researchers seek to expand the domain of emojis through different mediums of communication, ways of usage, and means of emotion conveyance. Finally, we discuss and offer insights into the potential opportunities and challenges that emojis will bring for future HCI research. First, the results indicated that women used both positive and negative emojis more often than men did based on their responses about their usage of the 40 common emojis. Women also indicated that they used emojis more often than men when writing text messages, social media posts, and replies to social media posts of other people. The first study of the current project investigated how adhering to norms of moderate emotional intensity (via emojis) translates into more or less positive interpersonal outcomes.
These included the so-called Big Five (openness, extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and neuroticism), the Dark Triad (narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy), and sensation-seeking. Emoji quickly became popular in Japan, as rival mobile companies copied DOCOMO’s idea. And as mobile computing continued to explode throughout the mid-2000s, companies outside Japan, like Apple, saw an opportunity to incorporate emoji on other platforms. In 2007, a software internationalization team at Google decided to lead the charge, petitioning to get emoji recognized by the Unicode Consortium, a nonprofit group that works sort of like the United Nations to maintain text standards across computers. As we typed back and forth about emojis, I thought about a scene in the HBO show GIRLS, where two of the characters argue about the state of their relationship at a party.
What started as a handful of pixelated faces on Japanese mobile phones has evolved into a visual language of over 3,700 symbols that billions of people use every single day. Yet despite their ubiquity, there is no official rulebook for when, where, and how to use them. The result is a landscape full of unspoken expectations, generational divides, and cultural minefields. A thumbs-up emoji can signal approval in one conversation and passive aggression in another. A red heart can feel romantic to one person and merely friendly to someone else. Understanding emoji etiquette is no longer optional—it is essential for anyone who communicates digitally.