Emojis have become a universal language in the digital world, enabling feelings and ideas to be conveyed quickly and effectively. But how people interpret emojis may vary considerably according to their gender, age and culture, reports a recent study published in the Plos One journal.
This study analysed the behaviour of 523 people – 243 from China and 270 from the UK, comprising 51% women and 49% men, aged 18-84 – according to gender, age and cultural background.
Participants were asked to assess the meaning of a series of 24 emojis representing six different emotional states: happy, disgusted, fearful, sad, surprised and angry. Each of the six was represented four times via emoticons from four common platforms (Apple, Android, WeChat and Windows).
The results revealed that participants’ age, gender and culture all had a significant impact on their interpretation – a finding with important implications for the use of emojis in cross-cultural conversations.
The researchers observed that “the older the participant, the less their interpretations matched the labels for surprised, fearful, sad and angry emojis”. Young people proved better able to accurately recognise the feelings conveyed by emoticons.
In terms of gender, women tended to be able to more accurately match feelings such as happy, fearful, sad and angry to emojis than men. As for the surprised and disgusted emoticons, women and men proved just as good at identifying them.
“The identification of surprise necessitates processing of both the upper (eyes) and lower parts (nose and mouth) of the face,” the authors noted. “Females were more likely to look at the eyes and males looked more to the mouth, which may result in similarly high accuracy in identifying surprised expressions for both genders.”
The Chinese participants were, on the whole, less likely to correctly identify the emotion than their UK counterparts. This could be because of the different ways emojis are used in China.
For example, while the smiley emoticon symbolises happiness for most users, in China, this emoji is often used for more negative feelings like sarcasm. “Eastern people tend to refer to the same thing with entirely different emojis compared with western people,” the experts stated.
Still, they stressed the need for further research in this area. “In our study, we did not ask participants for demographic information beyond gender, age, and culture.
“In the future, it would be interesting to consider a more detailed profile of the participants, including further individual differences which might be relevant to facial-emotion recognition ability,” the researchers concluded.