Emoji faces are ubiquitous and integrated into most people’s everyday (nonverbal) vernacular. Yet, we know little about how people interpret these characters in terms of their emotional content. Do people agree that an emoji face represents an individual emotion and that it is unique to a specific emotion? Are such representations similar across electronic platforms? The present study took a theoretical approach to address these questions by investigating shared agreement between emoji–emotion pairings across three electronic platforms (Apple, Android, and Samsung). Two hundred twenty-eight English-speaking adults completed an online survey that involved picking up to three emoji faces (presented from a common set from one of three platforms) for each of 10 emotions. They then indicated the strength of that relationship. We examined whether the intensities that participants gave to emoji–emotion pairings were specific and consistent across platforms. Our results showed limited shared agreement for the majority of emoji–emotion pairings, and significant variation as to which emotion category a “comparable” emoji belonged depending upon the viewed platform. We highlight the need for future emoji perception research to examine how different platform renderings of the same emoji might lead to miscommunication and interpretation discrepancies.

中文翻译：

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表情符号脸部渲染：探索表情符号平台在情感解释上的作用

表情符号的面孔无处不在，并融入了大多数人的日常（非语言）白话语中。然而，对于人们如何根据情感内容来解释这些角色，我们知之甚少。人们是否同意表情符号的表情代表一种个人情感，并且对于特定的情感而言是独特的？这些表示在电子平台之间是否相似？本研究采用理论方法来解决这些问题，方法是调查三个电子平台（Apple，Android和Samsung）的表情符号-情感配对之间的共享协议。228名说英语的成年人完成了一项在线调查，涉及针对10种情感中的每一种，最多拾取三个表情符号脸（从三个平台之一的通用集合中呈现）。然后，他们表明了这种关系的强度。我们检查了参与者对表情符号-情感配对的强度在各个平台上是否特定且一致。我们的结果表明，大多数表情符号-情感配对的共享共识有限，并且根据所查看的平台，“可比较”表情符号属于哪个情感类别的差异很大。我们强调了未来表情符号感知研究的必要性，以研究同一表情符号的不同平台渲染如何导致误解和解释差异。