Why do we use smileys

Their words let you know that person is not hurt, and is fact now mocking their clumsiness. The same sentence followed by closed eyes slanting down with a downturned lip, the classic sad face, will illicit quite a different reaction -- or at least it should. No emoji at all would convey the literal meaning of the statement and likely illicit the same response as the sad face, due to the nature of someone telling you that they are injured.

But the fact that the person is upset about this may not be as clear -- the use of an emoji clarifies how the person is feeling. Whether you like emojis or not, it's likely you will have used them at some point. Kaye believes that as emojis are more widely used, they can reveal someone's true opinion on something, for example during scientific surveys, to ensure their messages "aren't ambiguous," she said.

Many museums, companies and even transport networks are already resorting to a mild version of this, like the use of a scale of smiley faces ranging from happy to sad, instead of numbers, when asking for feedback on their services. The response to them can have more psychological insight than regular words or numbers, Kaye believes. The psychology of emojis. In a study , Kaye identified some personality traits linked to people's use of emojis.

Differences in emoji use by language. One key finding was that the people using them tend to be more agreeable in nature.

This has a similar truth among people who more often use facial expressions or varying intonation when face to face. Another factor her team identified was that people who commonly used emoji were more socially receptive and empathetic, making them more approachable.

Your mundane email should include a smiley face or a party hat to add a dash of color or a blip of personality. The emoji options are endless, which ensures that you can keep your readers on their toes at all times.

Not only do emojis liven up your conversations, but they also have the ability to pick up where correct grammar or physical cues are lacking. It is important to emphasize our communication with our body language and facial expressions, yet technological advances make that a difficult task. However, emojis make the task less daunting and more entertaining for both the reader and the sender. They are a more advanced form of text-based, casual conversation and they engage the reader.

Emojis are essential to communicate emotion, something that words cannot portray. However, they do not hold value in the academic world or in a context that demands an objective voice.

Emojis are meant to be fun, light-hearted, and convey a broad range of emotions efficiently and in a way that words sometimes cannot. Interpretation is vast when it comes to communication in the 21st Century. Emojis also have the ability to make it easier to portray your simple text or email. Here are some emojis that you can add to a text message or email to add emotion and remove interpretation:.

This emoji often expresses genuine happiness and warm, positive feelings. Are you sending an email that involves a lot of mundane information or a request? Add this emoji and provide a light-heartedness to your email. This emoji often conveys enthusiastic feelings of love, infatuation, and adoration. Are you satisfied with a business partner or client response? In the field of medicine and public health, studies on emoji mainly focus on correcting personal behavior and improving doctor-patient communication.

Emoji can be used to guide people's behavior regarding health, and it has been shown that using emoji can reinforce correct behavior when it comes to hand hygiene monitoring Gaube et al. Furthermore, using emoji can improve communication between doctors and patients and also enhance patients' abilities to manage their own health Balas et al.

Some researchers suggest developing a set of emoji specifically to be used for patient care, which could help patients better understand and communicate the challenges they face in health management Skiba, In addition, emoji can be used for the identification and prediction of mental illness due to their strength in emotional expression.

Marengo et al. In the field of education, research focuses on the impact of emoji on learning efficiency. It has been found that the use of emoji in classroom activities will help students better understand what they have learned Brody and Caldwell, , especially in computer-mediated teaching online learning Dunlap et al.

Emoji can help young children understand abstract concepts such as security, interpersonal management and emotions and also improve their ability to express themselves Fane, ; Fane et al. Understanding users' real emotions when they use emoji is important for future research. At present, it is difficult to accurately measure participants' true reactions through self-reporting.

Categorizing emotions by amassing a corpus using big data is unable to depict users' complex emotions such as are expressed by emoji at a more detailed level, for example emotions such as shame, anger and so on. Therefore, we hold the opinion that in the future, researchers can use some psychological methods in the corpus test to measure the physiological indexes of participants with professional equipment such as nuclear magnetic resonance, electroencephalography and multipurpose polygraphs to depict users' real emotions more accurately.

Future research could also benefit from a more qualitative approach, such as interviews and case studies to learn about emoji use in the context of real-world communication. In practice, some researchers suggest that video and screen shots can be used in concrete operations to observe and record users' choices of emoji during communication Gibson et al.

We believe that observing whether users' actual facial expressions differ from their selected emoji emotionally in communication can help researchers understand users' psychological mechanism in communication.

At present, research focuses on the description of users' preference for emoji, but fails to go deeply into the underlying reasons. Users' preferences for emoji are influenced by many factors such as contextual information, interpersonal relationships, familiarity with emoji and personal interpretations other than official definitions, which are all worthwhile factors to explore.

The emergence and widespread use of stickers has impacted the status of emoji, and some research has begun to improve the user experience of stickers Shi et al. Whether stickers will replace emoji is an interesting topic for researchers. Under the impact of stickers, how to further enhance emoji's performance in emotion and semantic expression and improve user experience is also a direction worth exploring.

As part of popular culture, the development and use of emoji reflects specific political and cultural characteristics. Many researchers have interpreted emoji's social influence from different perspectives. For example, some uncivilized use of emoji can harm public consciousness, a point which is not yet appreciated by the public Zerkina et al.

Other researchers believe that the popularity of emoji reflects multicultural communication and cultural globalization Skiba, , and that there is some unconscious power behind the use of non-verbal cues like emoji Elder, , which strengthen the inequality and exploitation of our social system Stark and Crawford, For example, Leslie argues that the quantitative use of emoji in the workplace such as the use of emoji to give ratings has turned the employee into something like an on-the-shelf item in a digital economy warehouse, affecting their freedom.

The democratization of emoji selection and Unicode should also be discussed. Emoji of different skin colors have been introduced to address the lack of racial representation Sweeney and Whaley, Therefore, future research can explore the deeper meaning of emoji use from different perspectives, especially the links between emoji use and political movements, subcultural groups, and social inequality.

This paper systematically reviews related research on emoji, aiming to provide a global perspective and clues for researchers interested in emoji. This paper summarizes the developmental process, usage features, functional attributes, and fields of research related to emoji. Emoji developed from emoticons, and have both emotional and semantic functions.

The use of emoji is influenced by and varies according to factors such as individual circumstances, culture, and platforms. Ambiguity and misunderstanding may occur in different situations and cultural backgrounds.

From the perspective of many fields communication, computing, behavioral science, marketing, and education , this paper comprehensively combs the research topics, methods and tools used in studies related to emoji, systematically summarizes the research status of emoji in various fields, and puts forward some new perspectives for future emoji research such as emotional association, use preference, new modalities and impacts on society.

The datasets generated for this study are available on request to the corresponding author. QB contributed conception and design of the study. All authors contributed to manuscript revision, read, and approved the submitted version. The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Ai, W. Google Scholar. Al Rashdi, F. Functions of emojis in WhatsApp interaction among Omanis. Discourse Context Media 26, — Al-Azani, S. Albawardi, A. The translingual digital practices of Saudi females on WhatsApp. Discourse Context Media 25, 68— Aldunate, N.

An integrated review of emoticons in computer-mediated communication. Alshenqeeti, H. Are emojis creating a new or old visual language for new generations? A socio-semiotic study. Aoki, S. Archer, D. Words and everything else: verbal and nonverbal cues in social interpretation. Aull, B. A study of phatic emoji use in WhatsApp communication. Internet Pragmat. Ayvaz, S. The effects of emoji in sentiment analysis. Balas, B. Thin-slice perception develops slowly. Child Psychol. Barbieri, F.

Revealing patterns of Twitter emoji usage in Barcelona and Madrid. Berengueres, J. Bich-Carriere, L. Say it with a smiling face with smiling eyes: judicial use and legal challenges with emoji interpretation in Canada. Semiotics Law 32, — Boothe, D. Brody, N. Cues filtered in, cues filtered out, cues cute, and cues grotesque: teaching mediated communication with emoji pictionary.

Butterworth, S. Sender gender influences emoji interpretation in text messages. Cahyaningtyas, R. Cappallo, S. New modality: emoji challenges in prediction, anticipation, and retrieval.

IEEE Trans. Multimedia 21, — Carvalho, P. Chairunnisa, S. Analysis of emoji and emoticon usage in interpersonal communication of Blackberry messenger and WhatsApp application user. Chao, C. Chen, X. Exploring user behaviour of emoticon use among Chinese youth. Chen, Y. Chen, Z. Cheng, L. Do I mean what I say and say what I mean? Fonseca J. Chik, A. A comparative multimodal analysis of restaurant reviews from two geographical contexts.

Cho, K. The differences of emoticon use and its effects depending upon problem types and discussion message types in the process of online problem-solving discussions. Cramer, H. Daniel, T. Emojis affect processing fluency on social media. Media Cult. Das, G. To emoji or not to emoji? Examining the influence of emoji on consumer reactions to advertising.

Derks, D. Emoticons and online message interpretation. The role of emotion in computer-mediated communication: a review. Dimson, T. Emojineering part 1: machine learning for emoji trends. Blog Donato, G. Dresner, E. Functions of the nonverbal in CMC: emoticons and illocutionary force. Theory 20, — Dunlap, J. Elder, A. What words can't say: emoji and other non-verbal elements of technologically-mediated communication. Ethics Soc. Esposito, G. Nudging to prevent the purchase of incompatible digital products online: an experimental study.

Fane, J. Using emoji as a tool to support child wellbeing from a strengths-based approach. Contexts 21, 96— Exploring the use of emoji as a visual research method for eliciting young children's voices in childhood research. Early Child Dev. Care , — Felbo, B. Fernandez-Gavilanes, M. Creating emoji lexica from unsupervised sentiment analysis of their descriptions. Expert Syst. Gallo, K. A focus group approach to understanding food-related emotions with children using words and emojis.

Ganster, T. Same same but different!? The differential influence of smilies and emoticons on person perception. Gantiva, C. Cortical processing of human and emoji faces: an ERP analysis. Gaspar, R. Crisis as seen by the individual: the Norm Deviation Approach. Psyecology 6, — Beyond positive or negative: qualitative sentiment analysis of social media reactions to unexpected stressful events.

Gaube, S. How a smiley protects health: a pilot intervention to improve hand hygiene in hospitals by activating injunctive norms through emoticons. Gawne, L. Emoji as digital gestures. Language Internet Ge, J. Emoji rhetoric: a social media influencer perspective. Gibson, W. Discourse Context Media 26, 91— Guthier, B. Hall, J. Self-monitoring, honesty, and cue use on Facebook: the relationship with user extraversion and conscientiousness. Hallsmar, F. Multi-class sentiment classification on Twitter using an emoji training heuristic.

Data Syst. Harris, R. An investigation of the computer-mediated communication of emotions. Hayati, S. Herring, S. Hjartstrom, H. Distraction and facilitation: the impact of emotional sounds in an emoji oddball task. PsyCh J. Hogenboom, A. Jack, R. Cultural confusions show that facial expressions are not universal. Jaeger, S. Dominant meanings of facial emoji: insights from Chinese consumers and comparison with meanings from internet resources. Food Qual. Measurement of product emotions using emoji surveys: case studies with tasted foods and beverages.

Measuring consumers' product associations with emoji and emotion word questionnaires: case studies with tasted foods and written stimuli. Food Res. Valence, arousal and sentiment meanings of 33 facial emoji: insights for the use of emoji in consumer research.

Can emoji be used as a direct method to measure emotional associations to food names? Preliminary investigations with consumers in USA and China. Jiang, F. Microblog sentiment analysis with emoticon space model. Jibril, T. Relevance of emoticons in computer-mediated communication contexts: an overview. Asian Soc. Juhasz, A. Mobile phone use in romantic relationships.

Marriage Fam. Kaneko, D. EmojiGrid: a 2D pictorial scale for cross-cultural emotion assessment of negatively and positively valenced food. Kaye, L. Kelly, R. Khandekar, S. Kim, J. Kimura, M.

Kraus, L. LeCompte, T. Lee, D. Social Science Electronic Publishing. Lee, J. Lee, V. The effect of social presence on the facial and verbal expression of emotion and the interrelationships among emotion components. Nonverbal Behav.

Leslie, E. This other atmosphere: against human resources, emoji and devices. Li, M. Multi-class Twitter sentiment classification with emojis. Li, W. Li, Y. Enhancing targeted advertising with social context endorsement. Liebeskind, C. Lim, S. On stickers and communicative fluidity in social media.