Given the rapid increase in online communication through social media, emoji are something that most of us encounter every day – often with conversational partners from different cultures, and across different age groups and genders.
Emoji are an important substitute for non-verbal cues (such as facial expressions), which are absent in online written communication. Some of the most common additions to text messages are emoji representing facial emotional expressions, such as happiness, sadness, anger, surprise, fear, and disgust (the six ‘universal’ emotions).
We might assume that when we use emoji, particularly to convey a relatively basic emotion, that our intentions are clear to the receiver. However, given that there are individual differences in how ‘real’ facial emotions are perceived, it seems likely that there are also individual differences in the perception of emotions conveyed by emoji. Interestingly, to date, relatively little is known about individual differences in emoji interpretation.
Our survey said...
In our study we examined the influence of gender, age, and culture on emoji comprehension. Over 500 participants across the UK and China completed an emoji classification task in which they were presented with a series of emoji, each representing one of six facial emotional expressions, across four commonly used platforms.
Each of the six studied emojis was represented four times, using emojis from the Apple, Windows, Android, and WeChat platforms, all of which are slightly different from one another.
Their task was to choose from one of six labels (happy, sad, angry, surprised, fearful, disgusted) which emotion was represented by each emoji. Similar to findings with ‘real’ facial emotions, results showed that age, gender, and culture all had a significant impact on how emojis were classified by participants.