Think twice before you reply to a message with just an emoji 鈥� people鈥檚 interpretation of them can vary.
Previous studies suggest that . at the University of Nottingham, UK, and her colleagues wondered whether a person鈥檚 gender, as well as other factors, also affects their interpretation of emojis.
To learn more, they enlisted 253 Chinese people and 270 British people aged between 18 and 84 years old, with a roughly equal split of men and women, to take part in an online survey.
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The researchers chose 24 emojis that represented one of six emotions: happy, disgusted, fearful, sad, surprised or angry, based on the suggested ones that appear when you type out these words. There were four emojis per emotion, representing the different designs used by Apple, Windows, Android and WeChat.
Each participant then assigned the emojis to the emotion that they thought was the best match.
Women were more likely to match the emojis to the same emotions chosen by the researchers, compared with the men. It may be that women are better at recognising facial expressions, possibly because they make more eye contact, according to the team.
The younger participants also matched up the emojis better than their older counterparts, perhaps because they use these more often.
Meanwhile, the British participants matched the emojis better than the Chinese participants, which may be due to the latter group using emojis in a different way. 鈥淔or example, it has been suggested that they [people in China] seldom use the happy emoji to express happiness, instead, they use it for negative meanings such as sarcasm,鈥� according to the researchers.
鈥淲hen you鈥檙e then sending someone a message with an emoji, you can鈥檛 just assume that they see it the same way that you do,鈥� says Filik.
at the University of Ottawa, Canada, says that matching 24 emojis to just six emotions is quite constrictive. Nevertheless, 鈥渢here are issues with assigning specific emotional labels to emojis when we don鈥檛 know how they鈥檙e interpreted by different online communities鈥�, she says. 鈥淔or example, you would have never thought to use an eggplant as an innuendo if that meaning hadn鈥檛 been developed in specific communities.鈥�
PLoS ONE
