If you send this in a text message, it could damage how people perceive you

For those of us old enough to remember a world without emojis, life feels a whole lot more complicated nowadays. It isn’t enough to just type out what’s going or how you’re feeling, you’re now expected to literally animate the mundanities of everyday life.

That’s a particularly pessimistic take on the emoji. Still, there’s no denying that emojis have further complicated texting, which was already a hard medium to convey notions like sarcasm or humor. On that note, a fascinating new study is advising everyone to avoid an entire category of emojis or risk being labeled a “downer.”

Researchers from the University of Ottawa say that using a “negative emoji” of any kind is enough to have your message completely misinterpreted. According to their findings, if a negative emoji is part of a text, the sender will be perceived negatively regardless of their intentions.

“Even if you have a positive message with a negative emoji, the receiver will interpret the sender as being in a negative mood. Any reference to negativity will drive how people interpret your emotional state when you write a text message,” explains lead study author Isabelle Boutet, a Full Professor in Psychology in the Faculty of Social Sciences. “We also found certain types of messages were more difficult to convey; people have a lot of problems interpreting messages that are meant to convey irony or sarcasm.”

This emoji backlash works both ways as well. Study authors say if you pair a negative message with a happy emoji, the recipient will likely either be puzzled or unsettled.

“Emojis are consequential and have an impact on the interpretation of the sender by the receiver and if you display any form of negativity – even pairing a positive emoji with a negative message – it is going to be interpreted negatively. You are going to be perceived as a person who is cold, and you will come across as in a negative mood when using negative emojis, regardless of the tone,” Professor Boutet says.

A total of 38 local UO students took part in this research. First, the students were shown 12 different sentence-emoji pairings of varying temperaments (happy, negative, sad, etc). Importantly, some sentences were positive but included a negative emoji and vice versa. From there each participant rated the sentences in terms of the sender’s emotional state and the message the sender was trying to convey.

No one walks up to their office manager with a smile from ear to ear and proclaims they just had the worst weekend of their life. Similarly, have you ever approached a friend with a scowl on your face and said it’s great to see them? No, because that would be insane. The research team says, in light of these findings, perhaps people should start treating texts and emojis like they treat real-world face-to-face interactions.

“People often try to control the emotion they convey with their faces to avoid social conflict. Yet people use emojis for fun without giving it much thought when, in fact, they have a strong impact on interpersonal interactions,” Professor Boutet adds.

Professor Boutet and her team even wonder if the young children of today, and future generations, will slowly but surely lose the ability to pick up on facial emotions due to performing most of their communicating via text or emoji.

“The big question is do emojis act as proxies, do they engage the same mechanism as facial expressions of emotions that play a large role in face-to-face (FTF) interaction? With FTF interactions, we have – through evolution – developed very evolved mechanisms that process these facial expressions of emotions. Kids use a lot of these digital interactions and they risk losing the ability to interact FTF,” she comments.

In this writer’s opinion, people use emojis so freely and nonsensically because emojis themselves are considered nonsense. From dragons, bugs, and snowmen to everything else in emoji-land, it’s hard to take these tiny caricatures seriously. Just keep in mind that the emojis themselves may be nonsense, but the perceptions they spark aren’t.

“You should not think that emojis are a cute little thing that you add in a text message and that it has no consequence on your interaction. Emojis have a large consequence and strong impact on how your text message will be interpreted and how you will be perceived,” Boutet concludes.

The full study can be found here, published in Computers in Human Behavior.