So, if that’s something you’re concerned about, let’s talk about some of the safer emojis you can use at work. Of course, corporate vocabulary tends to be slow to adapt to these changes, so you won’t have to worry about not being able to celebrate your team’s wins with the ol’ 🙌 emoji any time soon. According to the Unicode Consortium, flags 🏁🚩🏴‍☠️ are the least popular category of emojis, even though there are at least 250 of them in the emoji catalog. In other words, these symbols can be used to take the “emotional temperature” of a collective more effectively than perhaps even video calls.

In short, emojis can enrich emotional expression, but they complement rather than replace words. In this sub-theme, two articles discussed and examined how leveraging additional users’ contextual information can enhance the use of emojis to share emotions. Their goal is to transmit more information about the senders’ context that is unknown to the recipients. This direct contextual information reflects the authors’ design principle of minimizing ambiguity in interpretation. Through three systems and studies, the paper found that users were able to infer better the meaning of the messages by incorporating additional contextual information. These studies also emphasized the importance of facilitating shared understanding between users.

Several articles introduce new modalities for emotion communication that are inaccessible to those outside of visual impairments. As more improvements are made towards the accessibility of emoji, designers should consider implications for those with different physical abilities outside of the visual. The corpus shows that emojis have evolved from text-messaging icons to more complex multimodal forms. These modalities include AR/VR/MR, biosignals, haptics, and speech bubble form. These subthemes have little to do with emoji as Unicode-based icons, and more to do with the role in which emoji plays as a nonverbal communicative marker of emotion. Notably, the identified articles frequently made direct comparisons to or cited emojis as inspiration for the emotion communication systems presented.

Emojis can be a great way to help your messages stand out, as well as a way to connect with your followers. They’re especially useful on platforms like Instagram, X, and Facebook to capture the attention of your followers. Emojis can also be used in less formal conversations or team chats. They are great for reacting to comments, sharing a laugh, or just adding some personality to a conversation. They’re also perfect for helping to create a friendly work environment and culture. In professional or mixed-culture settings, the same emoji may feel too informal or unclear.

They’re informal, personable and often used to add tone or humor to a message. Emojis can help convey a reaction when you’re emailing, texting or messaging someone who can’t see your body language. Lastly, the increasing number of platforms and services is another main explanation for emojis’ divergence. With the increasing number of social platforms competing for users’ attention and experiences, designers have created more tailored emojis that respond to the specific experiences that these platforms aim to provide. Future research should explore the consequences of this increasing partitioning and divergence of emojis across operative systems, platforms, and devices, as the choices will shape users’ communication in the long term.

This allowed users to choose emojis up to 38% faster than baseline and reportedly more suited to the conversation. In another study, Hong et al. (Hong et al., 2024) presented a keyboard interface using query expansion and emoji prediction to better suggest emojis for users. Lastly, Gao et al. (Gao et al., 2020) introduced a similar model for sticker recommendation, learning representations without labels and considering context across multiple turns of dialog.

People prefer either lean or rich communication channels depending on the media sender’s relation and motives (Kwak, 2012), as there are benefits and drawbacks to both. It’s about using them consciously as a supplement, not a substitute, for thoughtful expression and genuine connection. Digital text inherently lacks the rich non-verbal cues – tone of voice, facial expressions, gestures – that convey so much meaning in face-to-face interaction. From humble beginnings as simple text-based emoticons 🙂 to the thousands of graphical symbols available today, emojis have revolutionized how we interact online. Billions are sent daily across platforms like WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook.

Apple originally called this “Information Desk Attendant,” in which an outstretched palm was meant to suggest a guiding gesture. However, many users interpreted it as a hair flip, since the raised hand, at least in some versions, is depicted just below the character’s coiffure. A flick of the hair can suggest contempt, and, so, the helpful information desk attendant has morphed into a shorthand for snark. Several different emoji have been pressed into service to highlight insincere or snarky remarks.

We began our data collection by sending out a Google survey to forty-eight participants between the ages of fourteen and twenty-four. The survey consisted of three sets of questions regarding personal emoji usage within text messaging, Instagram, and Twitter. All participants were required to answer the text messaging portion first, then could choose to take either the Instagram or Twitter section—or both—depending on their personal usage habits. For qualitative data, we included short answer questions, as seen in the “short answer text” options of  Figure 2, allowing for individualized feedback. We then analyzed the information we received from these qualitative responses to pick out the themes and patterns we found amongst our participants. These articles presented research on new formats, images, or icons that expand the emotional scope of emoji.

Moreover, Adobe’s 2019 report also indicated that emojis can soften negative feedback, with 53% of respondents agreeing that emojis can make negative news or feedback easier to accept. According to these numbers, the reluctance to use emojis at work rises with the distance between the ranks of the interlocutors, at least in instances of upward communication. Discuss, share & collaborate with Pumble, a team communication app. This shows that the Unicode Consortium is committed to delivering what the majority of emoji users have been asking for — diversity. Strengthen your business communication and collaboration with Pumble by CAKE.com.

One of the main reasons for emoji’s popularity is their capability to provide nonverbal markers of emotion to text messages (Wiseman and Gould, 2018; Kelly and Watts, 2015). Previous research has shown that emojis can strengthen the meaning of a message, helping readers better understand its sentiment by providing visual and emotional context (Chairunnisa and A.S., 2017). Their designs and pictorial elements enable nonverbal cues from text and enable users to express emotions outside of words (Gawne and McCulloch, 2019; Novak et al., 2015; Boutet et al., 2021). As a result, users can convey different tones and emotions that might be lost or hard to express using plain text (Highfield and Leaver, 2016).

Social And Interpersonal Dynamics

They are a supplement to communication, not a replacement for clarity and thoughtful language. They can create confusion, mask true feelings, appear unprofessional, and even cause offense when used carelessly. Relying too heavily on them can also prevent us from developing the skill of expressing nuanced emotions effectively with words. The potential for misinterpretation skyrockets when communicating across different cultural, generational, or even social contexts. What seems like a harmless symbol to you might carry a completely different, potentially offensive, meaning elsewhere.

Common Emoji Meanings In Chat Messages

• These notes were compiled in a Google spreadsheet and used to inductively generate codes without trying to fit these codes into preexisting coding frameworks or theories (Nowell et al., 2017; Braun and Clarke, 2006).
• All product names, logos, and brands are property of their respective owners.
• Over time, most internal communication apps will even take into account your emoji usage and provide quick access to your favorite emojis, as shown below.
• We appreciate your time reviewing and reporting rendering errors we may not have found yet.

Originally, emojis https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JgUTyZfNDR8 were conceived as simple and pretty recognizable symbols that resemble objects or emotions from everyday life. However, emojis were not originally designed with the explicit intent to be as expressive as possible. Articles from this corpus reveal that the set of emojis has gradually become more nuanced with the addition of new emojis and allowing users to customize pre-existing emojis. More expressive emojis could benefit users with visual impairments or difficulty in recognizing emotions. Many articles of this theme focused on increasing the accessibility of emojis, either in recognizing the emotions they convey or for those users with disabilities.

In sum, by guiding attention and altering emotional salience, emojis can make communication more memorable or clearer, but they can also skew the message’s perceived meaning. Over time, most internal communication apps will even take into account your emoji usage and provide quick access to your favorite emojis, as shown below. In any case, misusing one of these emojis in business communication can have negative consequences both for your social standing and the status of your projects. Not understanding the most commonly accepted meanings behind different emojis can lead to serious misunderstandings in the workplace. On a more practical note, 83% of survey participants noted that emojis take up less character space, allowing them to communicate more efficiently. This is exactly why 65% of the knowledge workers surveyed by Atlassian’s Teamwork Lab use emojis to convey tone in written communication.

Medical V/s Social Model Of Disability: Understanding Disability From Two Perspectives

While Gen Z users have recently declared that using the laugh-cry emoji makes you out of touch, we still saw plenty of laughter across social media in 2025, often accompanied by 😂. With every Unicode update, new symbols emerge—representing cultural shifts, inclusivity, and digital trends. We’ll see more animated emojis, AI-generated emoji suggestions, and even emoji-based search queries in the years ahead. First, they can help you easily share your thoughts and feelings about a particular situation.