Emojis enjoy a high status in internet communication as a means of non-verbal communication. Billions of them are sent on Facebook every day, and half of all messages on Instagram contain emojis.
In 2015, the emoji “😂” became the first emoji to be named Word of the Year by the Oxford English Dictionary — a clear statement on their significance in modern day language.
Motivation of use
Simplicity, convenience, and the ability to express themselves emotionally are the main motivations that drive users to use emojis. In particular, emojis can help users express themselves, relax their mood, simplify/shorten communication and build their own identity.
They promote interactions, which includes establishing an emotional tone, reducing ambiguity, improving context appropriateness, and intensifying or weakening speech actions.
In addition, emojis are also used for greetings and to maintain and improve social relationships while strengthening communication within a platform. Likewise, they can be used maliciously to deceive and/or apply irony and sarcasm.
Variety of emoji use
When it comes to emoji use (you can simply copy and paste these emojis), the differences between features, platforms, cultural backgrounds, and contexts can lead to different meanings and understandings. Emojis are also used for some specific topics, such as in sexually suggestive contexts.
Individual diversity
The use of emojis is influenced by demographic and individual psychological characteristics.
Gender differences are worth highlighting. Comprehension is similar for men and women, but women use emojis more frequently and positively, while men tend to place more emphasis on choosing different emojis. However, this observation depends on the setting of the communication itself.
In public communication, women use emojis more often, while the opposite is true in private communication.
Women perceive emojis more familiar, clear and meaningful, while men use the same emoji to enhance emotional expression.
In either case, their use causes different emotions on both sides.
Women sending messages with affectionate emoji are considered more appropriate and attractive than men doing so, and when men send messages with less affectionate but friendly emojis, they are considered more appropriate and attractive than women doing so.
As people become more enthusiastic about using emojis, some emoji forums, such as https://www.reddit.com/r/EmojiReview/, have emerged. In these forums, people communicate with each other to explore the different uses and meanings of emojis.
With the increase of the need to express individual diversity, people are no longer satisfied with using the existing emojis with their obvious meanings in the system, but started to create their own expressions and add more personal characteristics to emojis.
These are new symbols created by people after recombining existing emojis.
Cultural diversity
Emoji usage is influenced by many factors such as cultural background, living environment, language environment, and user group.
Cultural differences have a significant impact on the use of emojis. Some specific uses of emojis are closely related to cultural background.
For example, Finnish, Indian, and Pakistani users use specific emojis according to their own culture.
People in countries with high power diversity and indulgence like in China use more negative emotion presenting emojis, while countries with high uncertainty avoidance, individualism, and long-term orientation like in Spain often use those presenting positive emotions.
Emoji use is influenced in part by a number of national development indicators (including life expectancy, tax rates, trade, and GDP per capita).
The most striking feature of emoji use in the “First World” cluster (for example, North America, Western Europe, the Russian Federation, and Australia) is a lack of emotion, while in the “Second World” cluster (for example, South America, Eastern Europe, India, China, Eastern Europe, Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia covers) emojis are used in a more specific, emotionally clear way.
The “Third World” cluster (for example, Angola, Nigeria, Sudan, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Pakistan, Nepal, and the Philippines) uses a mix of positive and negative emojis, and the “Fourth World” cluster (consisting of certain African countries) uses mostly negative emojis.
Certain language environments also influence the use of emojis — they are highly dependent on their linguistic and textual environment.
For example, there are greater similarities between the UK and America when it comes to usage due to the English language, while other comparisons such as Italian with Spanish reveal fewer similarities.
Emoji use is also related to interpersonal relationships.
The more polite and distant the conversation between people, the more abstract and static the emoji becomes, whereas emojis are used more specifically and vividly in groups where participants are more sympathetic, companionable, and intimate toward a particular topic they are talking about or person they are talking to.
Platform diversity
Platform diversity is one of the important factors that influence the use of emojis.
Although emojis use Unicode, the presentation style of them is different in iOS, Android, Microsoft, and other systems due to the influence of different developers.
Studies have shown that emojis on the iOS platform are more aesthetically pleasing, familiar, clear, and meaningful than on the Android platform.
This difference in platform presentation leads to misunderstandings and differences in the emotional and semantic meaning interpretation of emojis when used across platforms.
In addition, researchers studied different networking platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram and found that users of different platforms have their own preferences when using emojis.
The most popular emojis on one platform may not enjoy the same level of popularity on other platforms. For example, users tend to use emojis more frequently and positively on Facebook than on Twitter.
Inefficiency in smiley communication
Emojis can help users convey emotion and understand the meaning of a text, but the use of them also introduces ambiguity in the interpretation of communication, leading to inefficiency and at times misunderstandings.
Although emojis have visual similarity, their interpretation is influenced by cultural background, technical differences, their own visual characteristics and personal opinion.
The specific meanings users want to express with emojis may differ from their “official definitions”, leading to different interpretations of the same emoji.
For example, some people interpret this emoji 🙏 as “prayer” and others as “hand clap”. In this case, it is difficult for both sides to understand each other, which reduces the efficiency of communication.
Similarly, there are differences in understanding negative emojis. Statistically speaking, for the same negative emoji, the emotional feelings of the sender may differ from those of the receiver by up to 26 %.
The degree of misunderstanding of face emojis is higher than that of non-face emojis.
This difference in the way emojis are understood leads to inefficiency in communication, disrupts discourse, and can even destroy interpersonal relationships.
Sources: Bai Q, Dan Q, Mu Z and Yang M (2019) A Systematic Review of Emoji: Current Research and Future Perspectives. Front. Psychol. 10:2221. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02221 (accessed 2021–01–01).
