Gaby
Researchers at Chatham University in Pennsylvania found that the right emojis can soften the blow of negative work-related messages online.
In the 26 years since emojis were first created, they’ve become hugely popular worldwide.
Many of us regularly use them in office emails and text messages. But until now, there wasn’t a clear scientific verdict on using emojis in workplace communication. A 2018 study looked at thumbs-up and heart emojis and concluded those symbols improve workplace communication, according to the Daily Mail. A 2022 study, however, suggested that emoji exchanges among colleagues may be more common among people with less influence at work.
The team behind the new research defended emojis and their users. Dr. Monica Riordan says emojis can help convey negative messages, capturing conversational nuances that are hard or inappropriate to spell out in text.
What the Researchers Discovered
In an effort to understand the impact of emojis on negative messages in the workplace, the team conducted three experiments.
In the first experiment, 105 participants received different messages: some included emojis, while others did not. A thumbs-down emoji was used for negative messages, while a clapping emoji represented positive ones.
The second experiment involved 178 participants, in which emojis were replaced with GIFs that conveyed either negative or positive emotions. Finally, in the third experiment, which included 195 volunteers, researchers assessed the impact of emojis featuring faces, emotional words, and punctuation marks.
Across all three experiments, the study found that emojis boosted team morale, whether the emojis were negative or positive.
The study found that emojis helped recipients process the emotional intensity of conversations. Emojis also fostered a sense of closeness among team members and motivated participants to stay engaged, no matter the message’s tone. The authors added that emojis are especially useful for connecting colleagues who work from home.
“In remote work, just as in face-to-face interactions, the ability to appropriately express negative emotions is crucial for achieving good outcomes,” the researchers wrote in their article for the journal Computers in Human Behavior.
As researchers from Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona found in 2018, people around the world use six billion emojis every day to express feelings.
