What’s YOUR go-to emoji? Experts reveal what they say about you

Researchers have found that many different factors determine our choice of emojis, the symbols that help us express ourselves digitally. According to Daily mail

An emojis popularity, perceived meaning and even location on a smartphone’s keyboard all play a role in emoji choice.

The researchers found that people are more likely to use emojis with meanings close to popular words, with clear and less ambiguous meanings.

The researchers, based the use of emojis by one million users through more than 1.2 billion messages.

PhD student Wei Ai and colleagues analyzed the relationship of the emojis to words, to measure emoji semantics – their linguistic meaning – and to determine what makes some symbols more popular than others.

They found that more than 9 per cent of the messages contained at least one emoji.

Emojis with meanings close to popular words are more likely to be used,’ said Ai

‘Emojis with clear and less ambiguous meanings are more likely to be used, and they provide good substitutes to their word counterparts.’

Instead, users find several go-to favorites, many of which seem to say similar things.

‘We found that the popularity of emojis are really affected by multiple factors related to the semantics,’ said Ai.

‘It may also be because some emojis are less ambiguous, or better substitutes for their word counterparts.

‘There are likely other factors that are not related to the meaning, such as how they are located on the emoji keyboard or simply a rich-get-richer phenomenon.’

This means that when an emoji choice is popular, it causes others to adopt the same choice.

While people are increasingly using emojis to replace words in sentences, the majority of emoji use is to express emotions, for example the thumbs up emoji.

‘People do not use emojis as how they are described by the unicode standard,’ Ai said.

We know how people interpret the emojis based on how they actually use them in their messages, in the context of words.

‘It’s said that a picture is worth a thousand words.

‘Nonverbal symbols in online communication has shown their power ever since the first emoticon ‘:)’ is coined, and will be even more powerful as new forms (such as gif animations) become supported by modern apps and websites.

‘These symbols, as a ubiquitous new language, also make it easier to communicate across language and cultural barriers.’

N.H.Kh