‘Universal’ facial emotions may not remain so when turned into emojis, University of Nottingham team says after survey of Chinese and British adults. Age, cultural background and gender can influence the way people interpret the pictograms, the researchers say in article for PLOS ONE journal. — SCMP
Texting minus emojis has become unthinkable, with the pictograms now a mainstay of global online communication. But are we really saying what we mean?
“Some ‘universal’ facial emotions may not be ‘universal’ when they transfer to emoji,” according to researchers at the University of Nottingham who carried out a survey of more than 500 British and Chinese adults.
The person on the other side might interpret an emoji differently depending on their age, cultural background and gender, their study suggests.
For instance, Chinese texters might use a smile emoji to suggest negative connotations like sarcasm, and thus be less likely to identify it as “happy” than those in Britain, the researchers said.
“Our findings in relation to age and culture highlight the importance of context in emoji use,” the team wrote in an article published in the peer-reviewed journal PLOS ONE on Wednesday.
“For example, the possibility that participants in China may commonly use the ‘smile’ emoji for different purposes than to signify happiness, which means some ‘universal’ facial emotions may not be ‘universal’ when they transfer to emoji.”
For their study, the team recruited 253 Chinese and 270 British Internet users aged between 18 and 84 via online survey platforms. The participants were asked to review emojis representing six feelings – happiness, disgust, fear, sadness, surprise and anger.
The emojis were taken from four different platforms – Apple, Android, Windows and the Chinese chat app WeChat – where each is designed differently.
The researchers looked into how often the participants interpreted the emojis’ meanings in a way that aligned with the labels designated by the team.
They found that the older the participant, the less their understanding corresponded to the labels for the surprised, fearful, sad and angry emojis.
In terms of the gender divide, women were more likely to match the happy, fearful, sad and angry emojis than men.
The team did not find gender differences for the surprised or disgusted emojis.
They also observed that British participants were more accurate in matching the assigned labels for the happy, fearful, sad, angry and surprised emojis, while more of the Chinese got disgusted right.
Lead author Ruth Filik, an associate professor at the Nottingham University’s school of psychology, said the study suggested that there were individual differences in how people interpreted emojis.
“The key thing to note is that the results show how often participants labelled the emoji in the same way as the researchers – so they reflect differences in how people interpret emojis, rather than some people being more accurate than others,” she said.
“For example, if Chinese participants use a smiling emoji to indicate that they are being sarcastic, then they may be less likely to label it as ‘happy’ than UK participants.”
The researchers said the findings of individual differences could have wide-reaching implications beyond text messages as the use of emojis expands.
One example would be digital advertising, they said, where “multinational corporations may need to apply different emoji for marketing purposes in different nations”. – South China Morning Post
