Grandma, did you mean to send that eggplant emoji?
A new study conducted by researchers at the University of Nottingham found that older people tended to misuse emojis — such as surprised, fearful, sad and angry reactions — to express their emotions through texting.
Many people use emojis in chats to add spice, laughter or context to a conversation, and the study revealed that people perceive emojis differently due to their gender, age and culture.
However, adding the wrong emojis can change the course of the messages.
Researchers Yihua Chen and Xingchen Yang gathered a group of 253 Chinese and 270 United Kingdom adults for the study published in the journal PLOS One, with 51% women and 49% men ranging from 18 and 84 years, to understand the differences between how they perceive emojis.
The findings showed “a negative association between age and accuracy in emoji recognition in general.”
For the study, researchers presented each emoji version from Apple, Windows, Android or WeChat, which all have slight differences from one another.
They tested participants’ reactions to happy, disgusted, fearful, sad, surprised and angry emojis. The team did advise that since only six emojis were used in the study, respondents could have responded differently if they had more options to choose from.
Per the findings, women — unlike men — were likelier to correctly label emojis for happy, fearful, sad and angry icons.
However, it’s common for people to view emojis differently, which can lead to confusion or awkward interactions.
“Some ‘universal’ facial emotions may not be ‘universal’ when they transfer to emoji,” Dr. Hannah Howman, the lead author of the study, told South West News Service.
The UK participants were more likely than the Chinese respondents to match the assigned labels for all of the icons except the disgusted emoji.
However, the emoji chosen to represent disgust in the study was described as a “confounded face” online, which is attributed to the mixed responses when describing the emoji.
Also, Chinese participants had opposing views of the smiling emoji, which is typically deemed as “happy,” meaning they used it to signify something different.
“Our findings in relation to age and culture highlight the importance of context in emoji use,” Howman told SWNS. “Results of our study suggested that all of the factors under investigation … had a significant impact on how emoji[s] were classified.”
Overall, the Nottingham scholars advise future studies to review individual differences in interpreting frequently used emojis.
While people continue to process the meaning of each emoji, Apple is set to release 118 new emojis to users in spring 2024.
“It’s likely that the final public release of iOS 17.4 will come to users in March or April 2024,” said Keith Broni, 32, the editor-in-chief of the reference site Emojipedia, which approved the latest additions.
iPhone users will soon be able to enhance their graphic vocabulary with new icons such as a phoenix, a shaking head and four gender-neutral families.
The emojis are available as part of a beta version of the new IOS 17.4.
