Many Germans apparently like to have fun when writing private messages or tweets: According to a study by Ruhr University Bochum and the Berlin Charité, Germans often use the laughing with tears emoji. The research team also looked at how people interpret different emojis differently.
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Data from more than 280 million German-language tweets from 2022, as well as a smaller data set of WhatsApp messages, gave the research team insight into which of the 107 facial emojis examined appeared and how often. While the happy emojis – the tearful laughing face, followed by the laughing face and the winking smiley – were the most common in the data set, the scared face, the face in the clouds and the face with the dotted line – both introduced in 2021 – ranked last.
The next analog camera is probably made from LEGOThe meaning of emojis changes
What an emoji means is defined in Unicode. However, individual interpretations of the little faces, figures and shapes can vary greatly from person to person. For the study, 153 participants rated five aspects on a scale from 0 to 100: How familiar does the emoji seem to you? How clear do you find its meaning? How complex is the visual representation? What emotional content do you associate with it? How strong is its emotional intensity? Participants were also asked to describe the emoji with up to three words, which the research team analyzed using computational linguistics.
According to the study, there were clear differences in interpretation, especially in the last part. Some people consider a face that smiles only slightly to be friendly, others passive-aggressive. There are also always reinterpretations, so a slightly laughing face can also mean “I feel empty inside” or, for example, the vegetation emoji, which sometimes contains ambiguity. The added emojis will also change the meaning of the previous ones, for example, the new emoji can express the emotion that was previously meant to be used as an emergency solution. However, for the participants it was quite clear: the crying laughing emoji, on the other hand, meant “funny” or “laughing”.
The research team found that participants rated more well-known emojis as more positive, emotional and clear. The more complex a face was in appearance, the more unknown and ambiguous participants rated it. “Negative emojis are emotionally more intense than positive emojis,” says co-author Tatjana Scheffler, a linguist at Ruhr University Bochum. The team has the results Journal published in Behavioral Research Methods,
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