New research suggests that Women interpret emojis differently to men.
Scientists say that the disparity in understandings comes from the fact that these digital pictograms can be ambiguous. This is the main reason why they can be perceived differently by different people.
This study recruited 262 women and 261 men to review 24 different emojis.
Each emoji represented one of the six emotional states as labelled by the team. These were happy, disgusted, fearful, sad, surprised, and angry.
The findings:
Women were found to be more able to accurately interpret happy, fearful, sad and angry emoji labels, when compared to men.
Emojis depicting surprise and disgust emoji were understood equally by both genders, the team said.
Dr Ruth Filik, associate professor in the School of Psychology at The University of Nottingham, said: “What I found most interesting and surprising is that there are so many individual differences in how people interpret these emojis.
“It is important to note that the results reflect how often participants labelled the emoji in the same way as the researchers.
“So, we should think of the results in terms of there being differences across people in how they interpret emojis, rather than some people being better at it than others.
“We should keep these differences in mind when using emojis in our messages.”
The researchers say ambiguity of emojis is worth further research, “especially when communicating across gender, age, or cultures”.
By Beat News
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