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.
1 Rq1: How Have Emojis Evolved To Better Communicate Users’ Emotions?
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.
As Wiseman et al. (Wiseman and Gould, 2018) described, emojis can take on meaning outside of their direct visual interpretations. The selected articles shed light on further extensions of this meaning-making enabled by these different modalities. For example, ‘Auggie’ (Zhang et al., 2022), which focused on creating extremely personalized, effortful experiences. Other articles employed biosignals to interpret users’ emotions and generate specific emojis (Semertzidis et al., 2020; Liu et al., 2017b; An et al., 2022; Liu et al., 2021).
They can also be used to mark positive attitudes, humour, or irony, and can help to soften potentially harsh language or strengthen expressiveness. Classic communication theory notes that face-to-face talk conveys meaning via expressions, tone, and body language, all lost in text. Users compensate by inventing proxies, for example, using caps lock to show shouting, or … to indicate hesitation. They explicitly mimic facial expressions (😀😍😖, etc.), hand gestures (🤏🤘🖐), and symbols (hearts🧡, twinkling stars✨) that cue emotion and emphasis. Emojis have a valuable role in written communication, adding emotional depth, facilitating better understanding, and aiding in emotional perception. Emojis have been found to activate brain regions responsible for processing emotions.
Due to the text-based design of these platforms, important nonverbal channels are removed from the initiation of romantic ties, thereby impeding people’s impression formation, as well as the evaluation of romantic compatibility. In turn, it comes as no surprise that emojis have taken on a crucial role in the online dating realm. For example, it has been found that using emojis can lead to significantly longer conversations between users of virtual dating platforms and increase the likability of forming stronger ties (Gesselman et al., 2019). Similarly, it has been revealed that emojis constitute an effective means to lead new online conversations in a more intimate direction (Thomson et al., 2018). The present study was approved by the Institutional Review Board at the University of Texas at Austin.
If someone texted something that could be seen as mean, then an emoji would help make it seem friendlier. She went on to tell me she sends an emoji of a rocket ship next to a heart when she wants to “send love” to her friends. “It’s like you could send someone just emojis when you have nothing else to say. It’s a way to say hi without saying hi. In this case, she was probably trying to remind the guy that she was still alive.” Lastly, if your institution or institutions have a press office, please let them know about your upcoming paper now to help maximize its impact.
Emojis aren’t childish—they’re shorthand for human emotion in an increasingly digital world. Anxious attachment, characterized by pronounced distress upon reunion with one’s caregiver following a brief separation (e.g., tantrums), is believed to arise from inconsistent caregiver responsiveness 19. Both anxious and avoidant attachment styles indicate a child’s lack of felt security within the relationship with their primary caregiver.
For example, employees in virtual team environments with higher EI were found to have better quality communication and greater team success 62. Similarly, students in an online classroom environment with higher EI showed a greater willingness to communicate compared to lower EI peers 63. These studies, along with others in similar disciplines (e.g., 64), suggest that EI may drive differences in online communication patterns. In a study examining EI and emoji use, it was found that participants with higher EI interpreted emoji-laden messages as self-revelatory, while those with lower EI viewed them as conveying factual information 65. This indicates that individuals with higher EI are better at interpreting the emotional cues in emojis.
While emoji use alone did not directly affect likability or closeness, its influence was fully mediated through perceptions of responsiveness. For relationship satisfaction, both direct and indirect effects were significant, highlighting the importance of responsiveness in shaping relationship outcomes. While they often enhance emotional clarity and message depth 20,26, emojis can also introduce ambiguity, especially in contexts with multiple possible interpretations, such as sarcasm 27. In intimate communication, emojis may sometimes lead to confusion or misinterpretation 28.
The different modalities in which this research was conducted also had an effect on users’ emotion communication. Moreover, the corpus suggests a trend in emoji research towards emphasizing the ability for users to create custom emojis. These changes show how emojis have become more personal and open to interpretation, similar to F2F communication. In summary, emojis have evolved into a diverse set of modalities to enhance their ability to communicate emotion.
Emojis As Digital Substitutes For Nonverbal Cues
Also, I think it will be more interesting to exploit the data a little more because your analysis is a little simple. The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. Participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.
Likability
These findings on EI’s role in virtual communication pave the way for a deeper exploration into how EI intersects with other psychological frameworks, particularly attachment. Understanding this intersection could be crucial in comprehending the nuances of how people form and maintain relationships in an increasingly digital world. 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.
On the other hand, think about that – if you have to Google the explanation of the emoji, would your friend or family member spend their time checking what it means? The social value of this particular study may be not so apparent as its theoretical value, because this is a basic (non-applied) study. 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. “Emojis are a newer form of communication, so if your recipient is less familiar with digital communication, an emoji can make you seem less competent simply because your recipient was expecting a more traditional correspondence,” Lehr said. Even when an emoji seems appropriate, it may not land the way you expect.
Emojis, as paralinguistic and nonverbal digital cues, enrich these “less rich” communicative exchanges by conveying emotional nuance, increasing expressiveness, and fostering relationship development 14. While emoji meanings may vary across languages and cultures 15, research suggests that their interpretation can also exhibit cross-cultural consistency 15, making them valuable tool for cross-cultural communication 16. To maintain relevance and inclusivity, the Unicode Consortium regularly updates emoji options based on user suggestions 17.
In general, the meaning of correlation should be more clear, avoiding drawing inferences that overstate its value. This study also uses 4-point Likert scales rather than more expansive 7-point scales which are known to provide more accuracy in data collection (cf., 80). The findings indicate that perceived responsiveness does not significantly predict perceived likability. While the correlation was slightly stronger for face emojis compared to non-face emojis, the difference was not statistically significant. Emojis have undeniably reshaped our digital language, offering quick, visual ways to express emotion and tone in a medium often lacking nuance.
In order to avoid confounding effects due to the name, gender, or profile icon of the fictitious dating partner, these elements were blinded in the final screenshots (Fig. 1). In some cases, instant talks using emojis in your external communications can enhance the appeal of your messages and make your brand more relatable. With every Unicode update, new symbols emerge—representing cultural shifts, inclusivity, and digital trends. We’ll see more animated emojis, AI-generated emoji suggestions, and even emoji-based search queries in the years ahead. Fig 4 visually illustrates the mediation effect for likability (H2), closeness (H3), and relationship satisfaction (H4).
- Emoji Trend Report, 91% of respondents said emojis make it easier to express themselves, and 75% of them felt more connected to people who use emojis (Fonts team, 2022).
- As of 2024, there are less than 4,000 total emojis, while back in 2017, there were nearly 500 thousand individual stickers on one messaging app (iMessage) alone (List, 2017).
- In another study, Hong et al. (Hong et al., 2024) presented a keyboard interface using query expansion and emoji prediction to better suggest emojis for users.
- Subtle differences in eye shape, mouth curve, or added details can change emotional tone without the sender realizing it.
According to the Unicode Consortium, 92% of the world’s online population uses emojis (Greg, n. d.). Emoji Trend Report, 91% of respondents said emojis make it easier to express themselves, and 75% of them felt more connected to people who use emojis (Fonts team, 2022). While emojis began as a set of simple icons in the 1990s, they experienced a rapid expansion in variety and complexity due to the advancement of smartphones and the growing number of social media platforms in the world (noa, 2023).
Several different emoji have been pressed into service to highlight insincere or snarky remarks. The study, “The Role of Prosocial Behaviour, Personality and General Mental Health in Predicting Emoji Use and Preference”, was authored by Janine Carroll. Unicode officially adopts emoji, adding hundreds more—like cat faces emoting happiness, anger, and tears. Recognising when to avoid using emojis at work is just as important as knowing when to use them. Using emojis like loudspeakers (📢) or sirens (🚨) for announcements, is like saying “listen up, we’ve got something to say! ” Similarly, using a thought bubble (💭) or question mark emoji in interactive posts like polls and Q&As suggests that you want to hear your followers’ thoughts – encouraging them to reply to your post.
Buschek et al. (Buschek et al., 2018) studied the effects of contextual information such as weather, location, and activity being added to a text conversation, comparing this information to emoji’s role in providing additional context to a message. This direct contextual information reflects the authors’ design principle of minimizing ambiguity in interpretation. Through three systems and studies, the paper found that users were able to infer better the meaning of the messages by incorporating additional contextual information.
Following this, the codes were collected into themes, which also underwent iterative rounds of renaming to create more accurate descriptions. Through several meetings, all authors discussed the themes to ensure they both agreed upon the definition and boundaries of each theme. After several iterations, the authors arrived at the three crucial themes that will be discussed in the following sections. In this section, we review relevant studies covering emotions in computer-mediated communication (CMC).