Emojis' Meanings Differ Across Cultures, Ages, and Genders, Impacting Online Communication Dynamics

Emojis are a great way to share your emotions in a text. But a new study found out that the interpretation of emojis can be different for everyone on the basis of their location, culture, gender and age. Research from Nottingham gathered 523 people from China and the United Kingdom to see how these people interpret different emojis. 51% of these people were women while 49% were men, between the ages of 18 and 84. The study provided 6 different emojis from Apple, Windows, Android and WeChat to these participants and asked them to match these emojis to particular emotions.

The results of this study showed that older people couldn’t match the emojis with their respective emotions of surprise, fear, anger and sadness. Women matched the emojis of surprise, anger, fear and sadness more accurately than men. Moreover, participants from the United Kingdom guessed the emojis more accurately than Chinese participants, except for one emoji showing disgust. The researchers of this study admitted that there are many limitations to this study because only six emojis cannot tell how people interpret all the emojis.

The purpose of this study is to know the importance of emojis in context as sometimes they cannot convey the actual meaning in conversation. This research suggests that more study should be done to know how people interpret and use different emojis.

The lead author of this study, Dr. Hannah Howman, says that emojis are important in online communication because they help us understand non-verbal cues. But we still do not know how individuals perceive emojis. The results of this study says that interpretation of emojis is greatly based on cultures, age and gender. This research is going to be a great source of understanding the use and importance of emoji in online communication.

Image: Anne-Lise Paris, (www.in-graphidi.com), PLOS, CC-BY 4.0

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by Arooj Ahmed via Digital Information World