The biggest mistake with emojis is assuming “anything goes.” In reality, context is everything. What’s how does Lauradate work playful in a Slack chat with coworkers might look unprofessional in a client proposal. A well-placed thumbs-up 👍 can signal agreement, but used in the wrong context, it can come across as dismissive. Six attention-check questions were embedded throughout the survey to ensure participant attentiveness.
Used excessively or inappropriately, they can overwhelm the dish or create an unpleasant taste. They can create confusion, mask true feelings, appear unprofessional, and even cause offense when used carelessly. Relying too heavily on them can also prevent us from developing the skill of expressing nuanced emotions effectively with words.
Although imagined scenarios can elicit meaningful responses, they do not fully capture the emotional depth, interpersonal dynamics, or contextual nuance of real-time exchanges. Additionally, examining only one partner’s perceptions neglects the inherently dyadic nature of relationships. Future research should consider using live asynchronous message-based interactions between individuals to improve ecological validity and provide a more comprehensive understanding of mutual responsiveness and relational dynamics. Prior work has shown that mutual support has been linked to improved mood and reduced negative emotions 54, highlighting the importance of capturing both partners’ perspectives. Examining both partners’ perspectives with live and asynchronous message-based interactions would provide a more complete understanding of how emojis shape relationship processes.
Effects that change colors in order to affect emotion may not work as well for those who are colorblind, and different entry techniques (i.e. swiping) or haptic feedback may be inaccessible for those with physical impairments. As more improvements are made towards the accessibility of emoji, designers should consider implications for those with different physical abilities outside of the visual. This review contains articles that pertain to emojis or systems centered on emojis. Articles were eligible for inclusion if they focused on emojis as they pertain to communicating, expressing, or sharing emotions. We included papers that were written starting in 2004 as we want to focus on developments in emoji use.
Within the corpus, we see articles that focus on making emojis more accessible to the visually impaired (Choi et al., 2020). Several articles (Zhang et al., 2021) dealt with techniques that deliberately seek to enhance accessibility, either through voice entry (Zhang et al., 2021) or for emotion recognition (Choi et al., 2020). Several articles introduce new modalities for emotion communication that are inaccessible to those outside of visual impairments.
For instance, marketing (e.g., which is the effect of including emojis in advertisements?), medicine (e.g., using emojis in scales given to patients to rate their pain), etc. The Promova online language-learning platform is the best opportunity for students from around the globe. It doesn’t matter what city or country you live in – if your goal is to master a foreign language, we will be happy to help. A few options are available, depending on your proficiency level, needs, and studying preferences.
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.
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. Responsiveness, whether directed at positive or negative information, involves providing active attention to the self-concept of the individual sharing the information 64. Effective responsiveness is characterized by a partner’s perceived understanding, validation, and care 65. In CMC, where nonverbal cues like voice tone, facial expressions, and gestures are absent, paralinguistic elements like emojis play a crucial role in conveying responsiveness 57. Emojis enhance the recipient’s understanding by intensifying, negating, or clarifying the emotional intent of a written message 43,66,67. As visual and non-linguistic cues, they enhance information processing 18, helping recipients interpret specific words more accurately or clarify ambiguous messages 19.
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. However, while attachment styles are viewed as generally stable over one’s lifetime (cf. 68), research suggests that EI is malleable. Scholars have documented the ability to improve EI through training and behavioral interventions 69.
By exploring how emoji use affects perceptions of a partner’s responsiveness and its subsequent impact on relational outcomes, this study makes a few meaningful contributions to understanding interpersonal processes in digital interaction. First, the findings bridge the gap between text-based communication and face-to-face interactions, suggesting that emojis make digital communication more engaging and effective. Second, regardless of the specific type of emoji, their use consistently enhanced perceptions of responsiveness, likability, closeness, and relationship satisfaction. Finally, the study underscores the centrality of partner responsiveness in shaping interpersonal relationships across both digital and face-to-face contexts.
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. Emojis substitute nonverbal cues such as gestures, facial expressions, and prosody. These days, whether in personal texts, social media posts or even workplace conversations, emojis have become a widely used and powerful way to express thoughts and emotions in digital communication. Emojis can quickly add tone, humor, and context that might otherwise be lost in plain text. 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.
Tip #2: Echo Your Company’s Tone Of Voice
Variations in emoji display across platforms and devices can obscure or distort intended meaning, particularly when users attempt to communicate subtle or culturally specific emotions. Future research should consider how users navigate these limitations and whether they adapt their communication strategies, such as by combining emojis with text, to reduce ambiguity and improve clarity in digital interactions. 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. One simple way to recommend emojis is by replacing words or emoticons in a text conversation with their corresponding emojis (e.g. the word fire becoming a fire emoji). While this is suitable for emoji and emoticon’s function as a literal pictorial representation of words, it falls flat when it comes to more complex interpretations of emojis. Articles in this category focused on contributions towards enhancing these recommendations to users.
- This review contains articles that pertain to emojis or systems centered on emojis.
- These days, whether in personal texts, social media posts or even workplace conversations, emojis have become a widely used and powerful way to express thoughts and emotions in digital communication.
- Cherbonnier et al. (Cherbonnier and Michinov, 2021) designed a new set of emojis that conveyed six basic emotions with greater intensity and recognition when compared to Facebook emojis.
- Importantly, all emoji-text combinations were intentionally designed to be congruent in emotional valence.
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.
As such, emojis have significantly transformed and enhanced online communication over the past decades, and become a cultural staple in and of itself (Alonso, 2017). Previous research supports the idea that emojis function as digital equivalents to facial and nonverbal expressions 113, allowing emotions to be conveyed more effectively in text-based communication. Emojis serve as a low-cost and efficient tool for enhancing emotional clarity online. Furthermore, this study found that emoji use significantly improved perceptions of partner responsiveness compared to non-emoji use, regardless of the emoji type—whether facial or non-face. Perceived partner responsiveness is a key determinant of relationship satisfaction, as it fosters intimacy 83 and enhances marital satisfaction 26. Beyond its role in general satisfaction, responsiveness has been linked to improved mental and physical outcomes.
Several different emoji have been pressed into service to highlight insincere or snarky remarks. However, the Consortium doesn’t dictate what each emoji looks like, what they mean, or how they should be used. Their exact appearance is in the hands of companies like Apple or Microsoft, and, so, our grinning cowboy will look somewhat different depending on who makes your phone and which app you are using. The most important key figures provide you with a compact summary of the topic of „Emoji usage“ and take you straight to the corresponding statistics. Updates give rise to the single dad, pride flag, and weightlifting woman emoji. Unicode officially adopts emoji, adding hundreds more—like cat faces emoting happiness, anger, and tears.
I think the paper is very interesting, nevertheless, the manuscript is incomplete because all the table’s contents are missing and without this information, it is difficult to evaluate your work. Also, I think it will be more interesting to exploit the data a little more because your analysis is a little simple. Also, speaking of „emotional stability“ out of the context given in the original research is not correct here, because the term „emotion“ conveys a temporary state of the human neurological system, and not a stable state. PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous.
Benefits Of Using Emojis At Work
We further assessed emoji use across varying relationship contexts (i.e., friends; family; dating or romantic partners; co-workers, customers, or clients) to obtain a more informed view of how and with whom people use emojis. Based on previous research, we hypothesized that both anxious and avoidant attachments would be negatively related to emoji use frequency, while emotional intelligence would be positively related to such frequency (Hypothesis 1). Additionally, as prior work has shown gender differences in emoji use 5, we further hypothesized women would use emojis more frequently than men, across all social contexts (Hypothesis 2). A growing literature has demonstrated the influence of attachment styles in the context of CMC as well. Anxious attachment often leads to negative interpretations of text-based communication, a medium prone to ambiguity and misinterpretation due to the absence of non-verbal cues 49,50. While these studies suggest that attachment styles may affect how people interact with others both in-person and via text-based messaging, the role of attachment in emoji use has remained unexplored.
In particular, Khandekar et al. (Khandekar et al., 2019) created an emoji-only social media site that utilized location-based posts. Users strongly relied on the contextual data of location and time to decipher the meaning of the emoji messages. The study highlights the significant role of emoji use in shaping individuals’ perceptions of their communication partner’s responsiveness, closeness, and relationship satisfaction. Interestingly, even simple emoji use appears to trigger a positive chain reaction in mutual interactions.
Our final corpus considers 42 articles that addressed methods and systems employing emojis to communicate and share emotions among users. Figure 1 shows the filtering process of the papers in IEEE Xplore, ACM, and Web of Science databases. After screening more than 1,300 articles, the most frequent reason to exclude articles in the screening stage was that they did not focus on enabling users to communicate their emotions using emojis. Of the records assessed for eligibility, 20 passed through the initial screening but were not included in the final review.
Furthermore, the study underscores the role of emojis as tools that help bridge the gap between the limited emotional bandwidth of text-based communication and the richness of FtF interaction. These findings carry important implications for understanding how digital communicators convey relational intent, particularly in contexts where tone and affect are otherwise difficult to interpret. Finally, while emojis provide accessible and standardized tools for expressing affect and relational intent, their standardized design may introduce limitations.
People can make their own meaning out of emojis to create a “shared uniqueness,” where an emoji can completely change its meaning depending on who the emoji is sent to, as well as the sender’s relationship with that person. Emojis have also become more customizable, allowing users to select different skin tones, genders, and body characteristics to present themselves more authentically (Robertson et al., 2018). Emojis are now capable of eliciting joy among users and supporting more meaningful communications across a broader range of spaces (Chen and Siu, 2017).
