As such, people with higher EI have been shown to communicate, handle conflicts, and build rapport with others more effectively than people with lower EI 57–59. In face-to-face communication, high EI individuals can detect emotion from facial cues more accurately than those with low EI 60. As a result, people with higher EI have more positive interpersonal interactions with partners and create more satisfying relational environments (cf., 61). 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.
The articles discussed in the theme “Augmenting emojis’ affordances and characteristics” are primarily concerned with more intimate conversations. This is likely due to the fact that they are more experimental and depart from established emojis and uses. The more bespoke systems are more difficult to deploy, and haptic / biosignal devices are not ubiquitous. The first theme, “Emotion Discovery with Emojis Made Simple” includes articles that deal with or could be extended to workplace environments, such as ReactionBot (Liu et al., 2018). This is likely due to the fact that it works around established norms of what emojis are, what they can do, and what they mean. However, this research is not specific to emotion communication or emoji in the context of the workplace or professional relationships.
- In the first stage, the coder reviewed the articles’ titles and determined their eligibility for inclusion according to the criteria previously set.
- 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.
- 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.
- The college freshman, who has had an iPhone for two years and admits she “only calls her parents on the phone and no one else, really”, explained that emojis sent alongside every text are the new normal.
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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.
All analyses were run on SPSS v.27 (see Table 2 for descriptive statistics). Researchers have extensively discussed the effectiveness of emojis to communicate emotions. Alshenqeeti (Alshenqeeti, 2016) shows that emojis convey tone, intent, and feelings to fill their role as nonverbal cues.
Friendships
We identify that there is space for research to be done on the use of emojis for relationships between friends or colleagues. We excluded articles that were written in a language other than English or could not be downloaded from their websites. We also excluded articles that did not study any form of communicating emotions, moods, or feelings. We removed studies that only analyzed current norms of emoji usage and perception, rather than their communicative purposes. We decided not to include derivate terms from emojis, such as “sticker,” “avatars,” or “emoticons,” to keep our focus exclusively on the evolution of emojis.
The first category, “Emotion Discovery with Emoji” is focused on aligning users’ emotions with the appropriate emoji. However, as emojis are regularly added by the Unicode Consortium, there becomes a greater diversity of expression available for users. The gradual increase in the set of emojis provides a sort of benchmark increase in the emotion alignment for users. Emoji research should aim to provide contributions other than adding new emojis to the set. It is also worth noting that a greater number of available emoji may come contrary to the goal of finding the appropriate emoji. This can be due to decision paralysis or the increasing time it takes to find the emoji on the keyboard.
Frequency Of Emoji Use
Correlational analyses were conducted to examine the associations between attachment styles and emoji use (Hypothesis 1). Moderation analyses were also conducted to explore the effect of emotional intelligence on the association between attachment styles and emoji use. Lastly, repeated measures ANOVA with post-hoc comparisons (with Bonferroni corrections) and independent samples t-tests were run to test whether women would use emojis more frequently than men (Hypothesis 2). Note that, due to statistical power, only self-identified women and men were included in the gender analyses. Additionally, participants had the option to skip any question they preferred not to answer, which caused slight fluctuations in the degrees of freedom across our tests due to sporadic missing data. We assumed this data was missing at random and left it as-is, without imputing any values, as the amount of missing data was too small to reliably explore potential correlates.
While MTurk provided a diverse participant pool, future studies could recruit real-life friend pairs to validate and expand upon these findings. Furthermore, participants were also likely more familiar with digital communication, which could influence how they use and interpret emojis. The sample skewed toward middle-aged adults, which may affect generalizability, as younger or older individuals might engage with emojis differently. Additionally, participants were based in the U.S. and completed the study in English. Because emoji meanings can vary by culture, language, and region, these findings may not apply universally. Given the sample’s geographic and linguistic characteristics, findings should be interpreted within the U.S. context, as results may differ across cultures and language backgrounds.
These findings demonstrate that the influence of partner responsiveness, enhanced through the use of emojis, extends beyond face-to-face interactions into digital interactions. They highlight the critical role of perceived responsiveness in digital contexts and suggest that emojis can enhance relationship satisfaction by acting as nonverbal cues that complement or substitute face-to-face communication. The main objective of the current study is to examine associations between attachment styles and emoji use.
Even so, there is still some amount of ambiguity surrounding emoji meanings, stemming from popular culture usage, context, and personalized meanings. The articles increase the contextual information provided alongside communication channels. Articles utilized data such as heart rate or input from voice and video to increase the information with which receivers can interpret the emotion communicated. Another way that articles were used is through the personal nature of communications. Abstract visualizations resulted in more ways for users to interpret the emotions, as long as they were consistent and not random.
Two main themes described how these papers have (1) improved how users select the right emoji from an increasing emoji lexicon, and (2) employed emojis in new ways and digital materials to enhance communication. We also discovered an increasingly broad scope of functionality across appearance, medium, and affordance. We discuss and offer insights into potential opportunities and challenges emojis will bring for HCI research. In this sub-theme, two articles discussed and examined how leveraging additional users’ contextual information can enhance the use of emojis to share emotions.
Fig 4 visually illustrates the mediation effect for likability (H2), closeness (H3), and relationship satisfaction (H4). Their effectiveness lies entirely in the user’s awareness, intention, and understanding of context. They are a supplement to communication, not a replacement for clarity and thoughtful language.
The use of such icons for visualizing emotions enables ‘leaner’ ways to communicate emotions using CMC, approaching the ‘richer’ expressiveness of F2F communication (Ahn et al., 2011; Derks et al., 2008). In fact, studies show that 92% of people use emojis in digital communication, and brands that use them in social media posts often see higher engagement. Emojis aren’t childish—they’re shorthand for human emotion in an increasingly digital world. Messages were presented as standard mobile screen images, replicating a typical messaging app layout with sent messages in blue bubbles and received messages in grey. To control for confounding variables, sent messages contained no emojis, while received messages included emojis.
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. 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 how people use Fanfills need to remember some rules.
Articles such as (Nishimori and Mukai, 2023) allow users to directly control the expressiveness displayed by an emoji. Additionally, as new emojis are added by the Unicode Consortium over time, there are more options for users to select appropriate 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. Emojis can quickly add tone, humor, and context that might otherwise be lost in plain text. Overall, the findings demonstrate that using emojis significantly enhances perceptions of responsiveness compared to not using emojis. However, the specific type of emoji – whether a face or a non-face symbol – does not influence perceived responsiveness.
Thank you for your continued support in championing open access for all. You need to know how to put them in the sentence to make these emojis explain your thoughts properly. To do this, you need to learn some basic grammar and vocabulary English rules. So the one person reading your text will easily understand it, while the other might need some clarification. If you want to send an emoji but are not certain about it, open your browser and type it in to double-check the information. The best place to find the description is Emojipedia – here, you can find every emoji that ever existed.
Below, we will discuss the most important rules suitable for online chats with emoji usage. Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines it as small images, symbols, or icons we use in electronic communication. Using emojis can be very beneficial, but only if you know exactly when and where you should put them.
Emojis are now capable of eliciting joy among users and supporting more meaningful communications across a broader range of spaces (Chen and Siu, 2017). Firstly, excluding ‘stickers,’ ‘avatars’, or ‘emoticons’ in our search query limited the potential scope of these articles. We decided not to include these terms as our research goal was to examine the evolution of emojis. Studies with stickers and emoticons that acknowledged emojis were still captured by our search query. Therefore, the terms used by our search query were sufficient for our research goal. Future systematic reviews should consider including these terms and also exploring how those pictograms have been employed to communicate emotions online.
Lastly, we removed meta-analysis or literature review articles as our goal was to analyze research articles. With the prevalence of instant messaging and social media platforms, emojis have become important artifacts for expressing emotions and feelings in computer-mediated communication. According to the Unicode Consortium, 92% of the world’s online population uses emojis (Greg, n. d.).