How your age, gender and nationality alter how you interpret emojis
An emoji that represents happiness to one person may signify a different emotion to another, with this varying according to our age, gender and nationality
By Chen Ly
14 February 2024
Emojis are commonly used for digital communication, such as in text messages or on social media
Mix Tape/Shutterstock
Think twice before you reply to a message with just an emoji – people’s interpretation of them can vary.
Previous studies suggest that men and women differ in how they gauge facial expressions. Ruth Filik at the University of Nottingham, UK, and her colleagues wondered whether a person’s gender, as well as other factors, also affects their interpretation of emojis.
To learn more, they enlisted 253 Chinese people and 270 British people aged between 18 and 84 years old, with a roughly equal split of men and women, to take part in an online survey.
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The researchers chose 24 emojis that represented one of six emotions: happy, disgusted, fearful, sad, surprised or angry, based on the suggested ones that appear when you type out these words. There were four emojis per emotion, representing the different designs used by Apple, Windows, Android and WeChat.
Each participant then assigned the emojis to the emotion that they thought was the best match.
