Analysis: people who rate themselves as agreeable, pleasant and likeable are
more likely to use emojis
By <https://theconversation.com/profiles/linda-kaye-251255> Linda Kaye,
<https://theconversation.com/institutions/edge-hill-university-1356> Edge Hill
University; <https://theconversation.com/profiles/helen-wall-251256> Helen
Wall, <https://theconversation.com/institutions/edge-hill-university-1356>
Edge Hill University, and
<https://theconversation.com/profiles/stephanie-malone-172234> Stephanie
Malone,
<https://theconversation.com/institutions/australian-catholic-university-747>
Australian Catholic University
When you add a smiley face to the end of a message, you may be saying more than
you realise. Emoticons, faces formed from punctuation symbols such as :-), and
emojis, picture symbols such as 😀, are now
<https://theconversation.com/no-the-rise-of-the-emoji-doesnt-spell-the-end-of-language-42208>
common features of the way we communicate using phone and internet messaging
services and social media.
<https://theconversation.com/signs-of-our-times-why-emoji-can-be-even-more-powerful-than-words-50893>
They can help your recipient understand a potentially ambiguous message,
reinforce the emotion in what you’re saying, or communicate your feelings
rapidly with a single character. But not everyone uses them – or interprets
them – in the same way.
So we set out to discover how the use of these symbols influences the way
others perceive us. Do different types of people use emoticons for a particular
purpose, such as managing their image, for example? If so, what psychological
factors are associated with these actions? To do this, we asked a group of
students to complete questionnaires about themselves and then allow us to study
their textual communication in a staged conversation.
The questions covered the students’ views on their personalities, self-esteem,
social anxiety and self-presentation concerns (how worried they were about how
other people perceived them). We also asked about the amount of emoticons they
used and why they used them for text messages, emails and Facebook. We then
took screenshots of their Facebook profiles and recorded a 10-minute
conversation they had with another, unknown student via Facebook messenger.
<http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0747563216302072> We found
that those people who rated themselves as agreeable (pleasant, likeable) were
more likely to use emoticons on social media sites. We also found that those
who were less worried about how other people perceived them were more likely to
use sad emoticons.
Mirror to the real world
It seems that different people use emoticons differently depending on their
personalities. People who are agreeable tend to use social and emotional cues
in the <http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/psp/75/4/1032/> real world to
communicate that to other people, such as smiling and being encouraging. And to
some degree that is mirrored in the virtual world through the use of smiling
emoticons.
This is particularly the case on social networking sites such as Facebook,
where messages may have bigger, wider audiences and where the interactions are
<http://firstmonday.org/article/view/2023/1889> richer and more complex than
simple, one-to-one plain text messages. We can speculate that people who see
themselves as more agreeable are stimulated in these virtual environments and
make more of an attempt to convey that part of their personality through
emoticons.
At the same time, if you're less bothered about how people perceive you, you
may be more comfortable displaying all your emotions, including sadness. And so
a sad face on a message may be an indication that you’re more concerned with
expressing yourself than with how others may judge you.
Some of our
<http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0747563216301522> other
findings also show how we’re more likely to use emoticons in some kinds of
virtual communication than others. Perhaps understandably, our participants
deemed emoticons inappropriate for more professional contexts, which probably
explains why they said they used emoticons less in email than in text messages
or social media.
Regardless of this, our participants reported that emoticons were a useful way
of expressing themselves and reducing the ambiguity of messages. This suggests
emoticons may be particularly important for individuals who find it difficult
to express or interpret emotion or social intent using just text and the cues
it <http://scholarworks.csun.edu/handle/10211.3/125100> can provide.
This has prompted us to start planning further research into whether emoticons
could be beneficial for those on the autism spectrum. These individuals can
struggle with social interaction and picking up emotional cues, so the clarity
that emoticons bring to potentially ambiguous messages
<https://theconversation.com/technology-as-a-social-lifeline-for-kids-with-aspergers-37852>
may help them to communicate.
Judging emoticons
For the final part of our research, we asked another group of people to look at
the conversations and profiles we had recorded, in order to study how other
people judge us based on our use of emoticons.
<http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0747563216302072> We found
that the more smiley emoticons a person had used, the more they were seen as
agreeable, conscientious and open to new experiences.
But this didn’t always correspond to how people saw themselves. The emoticon
users and those being asked to judge them were most likely to agree on how
extroverted and open to new experiences they were. This suggests that while
smiling emoticons may make people seem more agreeable and conscientious, that
may not match up with their own real-world personalities.
All of this hints at how much the way we use emoticons and emojis appears to
shape other people’s impressions of us – and the fact that we should be aware
of how we use them online. Although we recorded examples of observers making
positive judgements about other people’s emoticon usage, other behaviour could
lead to less favourable impressions.
<https://theconversation.com/profiles/linda-kaye-251255> Linda Kaye is a
Senior Lecturer in Psychology at
<https://theconversation.com/institutions/edge-hill-university-1356> Edge Hill
University. <https://theconversation.com/profiles/helen-wall-251256> Helen
Wall is a Lecturer in Psychology at
<https://theconversation.com/institutions/edge-hill-university-1356> Edge Hill
University. <https://theconversation.com/profiles/stephanie-malone-172234>
Stephanie Malone is a Postdoctoral research fellow at the School of Psychology,
<https://theconversation.com/institutions/australian-catholic-university-747>
Australian Catholic University.
This piece was originally published by
<https://theconversation.com/what-your-emojis-say-about-you-57523> The
Conversation.
