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. As text-based communication features less cues to form impressions to begin with, norm violations (in terms of overly extreme or insufficiently weak nonverbal displays) appeared particularly relevant during this stage. Finally, while emojis provide accessible and standardized tools for expressing affect and relational intent, their standardized design may introduce limitations. 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.
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The Role Of Emojis In Modern Communication: Are They Helping Or Hurting?
- Some studies investigated the differences between positive, negative, calm, or angry emotions, with varying willingness to use.
- If you’re going to use emojis anywhere, social media platforms are the place to do so.
- In essence, emojis can act as valuable digital paralanguage, attempting to replace some of the non-verbal cues lost in text-based communication, fostering connection and clarity when used appropriately.
In this section, we review relevant studies covering emotions in computer-mediated communication (CMC). We then revise the evolution of emojis and their use, including describing their increasing affordances. This isn’t just about sending smiley faces – it’s about understanding how communication works in the digital age.
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. Across the manuscript—and especially in the discussion—we have adjusted our wording to indicate/emphasize correlation not causation.
Knowing when to use emojis—and when to avoid them—can make a big difference in how your message is received. Nowhere are emojis more charged with meaning than in the world of dating. In early-stage conversations, the emojis you choose can make or break an impression. A well-placed 😂 after a joke signals that you find the other person funny, while a 😊 suggests warmth and approachability. On the other hand, sending ❤️ too soon can feel overwhelming, and overusing 😘 or 😍 before you have established genuine rapport may come across as insincere. Master the unwritten rules of emoji usage across dating, work, family, and friend contexts.
These tools make it easy to find the most suitable icons and use them effectively in digital communication. If you want to explore what specific emojis actually mean and how they render across different platforms, GetMoji’s emoji picker lets you search and preview any emoji before you hit send. Responding to a friend’s vulnerable or serious message with nothing but a 👍 can feel cold and dismissive. When someone shares something personal, reply with actual words, or at least something like ❤️ or 🫂 to signal genuine care. 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.
1 Eligibility Criteria For Inclusion Of Articles
All analyses were run on SPSS v.27 (see Table 2 for descriptive statistics). 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. The review also shows how systems employ different signals and environments to enhance emojis’ purposes and emotion communication.
Additionally, as new emojis are added by the Unicode Consortium over time, there are more options for users to select appropriate emojis. 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.
Furthermore, reciprocal responsiveness increases positive mood and reduces negative mood, while a lack of reciprocation can intensify negative emotions 54. As hypothesized, statistical analyses revealed that online conversation starters containing four emojis after each sentence led to significantly worse impressions than one or a complete absence of emojis. More specifically, a fictitious dating partner using multi-emoji combinations was rated less attractive and evoked a lower willingness to engage in further interactions. Three mediation analyses were conducted using Model 6 of the PROCESS macro to examine the indirect effects of emoji use on perceived likability, closeness, and relationship satisfaction, with perceived partner responsiveness as the mediator.
However, this research is not specific to emotion communication or emoji in the context of the workplace or professional relationships. We identify that there is space for research to be done on the use of emojis for relationships between friends or colleagues. The corpus suggests that emoji research has made emojis more interpretable for users through customization and contextual information.
Emojis can help convey a reaction when you’re emailing, texting or messaging someone who can’t see your body language. Across the board, participants thought that messages containing emojis were more responsive than text-only alternatives. This perceived responsiveness made the sender seem more likeable and the relationship seem closer. Surprisingly, this effect happened regardless of the type of emoji used, with no real difference seen between emojis that directly expressed the sender’s emotions – such as faces – and more neutral emojis showing other objects. As digital communication continues to evolve, emojis will likely remain a central part of how people connect and express themselves.
This is due to the tools and adaptations that communicators have developed in response to the inherent lack of nonverbal cues in CMC. One such adaptation is making nonverbal cues verbal by expressing their intent directly (Walther et al., 2005). Emojis are cartoon-like symbols, originally inspired by Japanese communication styles, that are used to express emotion in digital conversations. They’re informal, personable and often used to add tone or humor to a message.
Likability
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. New York Magazine’s Vulture created an entire fan fiction-esque text sequence between characters Ray and Shoshanna back in January following the show’s season 2 premiere. We have all of these easy ways to communicate, and yet, the way we choose to utilize them can sometimes leave us scratching our heads. Six attention-check questions were embedded throughout the survey to ensure participant attentiveness. These included three instructed response items (e.g., “In order to prove that you are reading questions attentively, please select ‘2’”) and three simple math questions (e.g., “What is 1 + 1? This is an attention check”). Choose clarity, choose connection, choose conscious communication – whether through carefully chosen words, a well-placed (and well-understood) emoji, or, best of all, the rich bandwidth of a real conversation.
PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, Meetheage community correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here. Despite the ubiquity of emoji use, scientific work on their use has been thin.
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). 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.
We conducted the search in June 2024 and gathered 1,122 articles through the ACM Digital Library, 80 through the IEEE Xplore Digital Library, and 187 through the Web of Science. We exported the results of the IEEE Xplore and Web of Science searches to CSV files, and the results of the ACM Digital Library search were exported to BibTeX as citations through their website. We then removed 120 duplicates using the articles’ DOIs, resulting in 1,149 articles.
