Women may interpret emojis differently than men

Each emoji taken from the Apple, Windows, Android, and WeChat platforms was labeled by the team to represent six emotional states – happiness, disgust, fear, sadness, surprise and anger.

A new study suggests that women may interpret emojis differently than men.

Scientists say this is because these tiny digital pictograms (emoji), used to express an idea or emotion, can be ambiguous and can be interpreted differently by different people.

Researchers recruited 523 people (49 percent male and 51 percent female) to evaluate 24 different emojis.

Each emoji taken from the Apple, Windows, Android, and WeChat platforms was labeled by the team to represent six emotional states – happiness, disgust, fear, sadness, surprise and anger.

They came to the conclusion that women could understand the emoji labels for happy, afraid, sad, and furious more accurately than the males can.

No gender differences were observed for surprise or disgust emojis, meaning both men and women interpreted them correctly, the team said.

Dr Ruth Flick, associate professor at the University of Nottingham's School of Psychology, said: 'What I find most interesting and surprising is how people interpret these emojis and there are many of them. Individual differences have emerged.

It is also important to note that the results reflect how often the participants labeled the emojis as the researchers did.

According to him: 'So we should think of the results as that people have different ways of interpreting emojis, rather than that some people are better at it (interpreting) than others. All of these differences should be considered when using emojis in messaging.

The researchers said that stylized faces expressing different emotions (emojis) can add suspicion and potential ambiguity to messages sent via text, email, or even social media.

To understand more about the interpretation of emojis, the team recruited 270 people from the UK and 253 from China, aged between 18 and 84.

Each emoji was assigned an emotion label by the researchers, which may not exactly correspond to emojis used in real life.

"For example, if Chinese participants use a smiley emoji to indicate that it is a sarcastic laugh, they may label it as 'happiness' compared to UK participants."

The researchers say more research is needed into the ambiguity of emojis, especially when communicating across gender, age, or culture.

Are emojis/emoticons widely used by adults, or are they just the language of teens?

A lady who turned forty earlier this month said: I have been using the internet since the mid-1990s when text-based emoticons were utilized to indicate emotion. The urge to convey these emotions through technology is not new, nor are the moods themselves, even though emojis are a novel means for doing so. Text-based emoticons are still used today by people of all ages. :) (Hey, one more now!)

Teens and Baby Boomers are less tech-savvy than Generation X, yet we are still familiar with books and conventional writing tools. This makes Generation X distinctive. My generation may offer wisdom to both the young and the old, serving as somewhat of a bridge between the two.

Why do young people and adults use emojis differently?

Teens who use them tend to utilize them more naturally.

As Joy pointed out, it's due to how young people and adults think differently, as well as, to some degree, the environments in which they were raised. Emojis may be considered a language in and of itself, and individuals express themselves differently while using a single language.

Adults seem to understand each other when they use emojis, so it's more than just ignorance (since most adults didn't grow up using the internet, at least not the modern internet). Examples of this ignorance include when adults use the incorrect emoji for the wrong situation or the eggplant emoji in any situation. Adults must find it less "natural" when younger people utilize emojis