2024-08-19 13:45:23
Message notification with emoji face: This has become an important part of digital communication. The teary smiley face is used most often in German-language short messages and conversations, followed by a smiley face and a smiley face, according to a study published on Monday by Ruhr University Bochum and Berlin Charite.
The scared face is the least used, followed by the “face in the clouds” and “face with a dotted line” emojis, which were introduced only in 2021.
The better known, the more positive rating
The researchers came to the conclusion that the more familiar the emoji is, the more positive and clear it is rated. The more complex the view, unclear and unknown it is, the more negative it is perceived. “Negative emoji are also more emotionally intense than positive ones,” explains linguist Tatjana Scheffler from the Ruhr University. This may also be because positive emojis are used more often and are outdated.
The meaning of more than a hundred existing emojis “is defined in Unicode, but their use and meaning in practice is very different from the meanings listed there,” said Ivan Nenchev from the Charite University Medicine. A slightly smiling face, for example, is described as both friendly and passive aggressive.
In an online study, researchers showed 153 participants all 107 face emojis available during the study. Respondents were asked to provide information about how familiar the emoji is to them and how they feel about its meaning. In addition, the researchers asked the participants to describe the meaning of the respective emoji using a maximum of three words.
To determine how often each emoji is used, the team used a database of over 280 million German Twitter messages from 2022. “From this we were able to see which emojis were used in context public and as usual,” explained Scheffler. Another small database of WhatsApp conversations reveals which emojis are preferred in private messages. The results of the study were recently published in the journal Behavioral Research Methods.
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