Your emojis are sending a message — just maybe not the one you intended
U of O student Olivier Langlois studied the language of emojis for his master's thesis
Do you send emojis to your partner? How about your friends? Your co-workers?
Careful, you may be sending a hidden message along with those little symbols.
Research by a master's candidate at the University of Ottawa suggests emojis can mean very different things to different people.
Olivier Langlois said he chose to study emojis because they're so pervasive in modern communication, yet there's been little research on their emotional effect.
Langlois gave 156 students at the university's School of Psychology a survey showing text messages with positive emojis, negative emojis or no emojis, then asked them to fill out a questionnaire about their reactions.
His subjects reported different reactions depending on their gender, and whether the emojis were coming from friends, lovers or an employer.
Poop emojis in the workplace
The laugh-crying emoji, for example, is normally a positive symbol, while the angry, swearing emoji is negative. Others are more subjective: the poop emoji might be funny between friends, but risks sending the wrong message in the workplace.
Langlois found women tend to be more negatively affected than men when they receive negative emojis in the workplace.
In a romantic context, Langlois found the more positive emojis a couple exchanges, the stronger the bond.
"There are certain relationships that I noticed that, for myself, we're using less and less emojis, and I wondered if that was a sign that maybe the relationship was deteriorating," he told CBC Radio's Ottawa Morning.
Cultural differences
Langlois also found emojis can be interpreted differently across cultures.
The recycling emoji is one of the top symbols used on Twitter, he said, but in Arabic online communities it's sometimes used when people post a prayer that they want shared.
Langlois is hopeful emojis will be seen as more than "childish pictures."
"They could really have an impact, let's say, for mental health or for assessing, for example, children that have maybe a harder time of explaining how they feel," he said.
"Instead of having to explain their feelings and maybe how they're hurt, they can actually show an emoji to the person helping them to really assess how they are feeling."
With files from CBC Radio's Ottawa Morning