Emojis are often used in digital communications such as text messages and social media.
mixtape/shutterstock
Think twice before replying to a message with just emojis. Emojis may be interpreted differently by different people.
Previous research suggests that Men and women perceive facial expressions differently. ruth fillick Researchers from the University of Nottingham in the UK thought that a person's gender and other factors might also influence how they interpret emojis.
To find out more, they asked 253 Chinese and 270 British people (about an equal number of men and women) aged 18 to 84 to take part in an online survey.
Researchers selected 24 emojis to represent one of six emotions: happiness, disgust, fear, sadness, surprise, and anger based on the suggestions that appeared when you typed the word. There are four emojis for each emotion, representing different designs used by Apple, Windows, Android, and WeChat.
Each participant then assigned an emoji to the emotion they thought best matched.
Women were more likely than men to match emojis to the same emotions selected by researchers. The researchers say women may be better at recognizing facial expressions, perhaps because they make more eye contact.
Younger participants also matched emojis better than older participants, probably because they used them more frequently.
On the other hand, British participants agreed better with emojis than Chinese participants, although this may be because the latter group uses emojis differently. “For example, it has been suggested that: [people in China] According to the researchers, people rarely use the happy emoji to express happiness, but instead use it in negative connotations, such as sarcasm.
“When you send someone a message that includes emojis, you can't just assume that they see the emojis the same way you see them,” says Fillick.
Isabel Butet Researchers at the University of Ottawa in Canada say matching 24 emojis to six emotions is extremely restrictive. Nevertheless, “assigning emojis specific emotional labels is problematic when you don't know how they will be interpreted in various online communities,” she says. “For example, it would never have been considered to use eggplant as an allusion if that meaning had not developed in a particular community.”
topic:
Source: www.newscientist.com
