Crying with laughter: Germans use happy emojis most often

Germans have a clear favorite emoji. However, many emojis mean something different to everyone, a study shows.

The most frequently used emojis are happy faces.

(Image: Svetlana Radayeva)

Aug 19, 2024 at 8:59 pm CEST

3 min. read

By

Anika Reckeweg

Many Germans apparently like to have fun when writing private messages or tweets: according to a study by Ruhr University Bochum and Berlin's Charité hospital, Germans most frequently use the teary-eyed laughing emoji. The research team also shed light on how differently people interpret different emojis.

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 insights into which of 107 facial emojis examined occurred how often. While the happy emojis - the face laughing with tears, followed by the laughing face and the winking face - were the most common in the dataset, the horrified face, the face in clouds and the face with a dotted line - both introduced in 2021 - came last.

The meaning of emojis is changing

What an emoji stands for is defined in Unicode. However, the personal interpretation 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 of 0 to 100: How familiar do they find the emoji? How clear do they think the meaning is? How complex is the visual representation? What emotional content do they attach to it? How strong is its emotional intensity? Participants were also asked to describe the emojis using up to three terms, which the research team then analyzed using computer linguistics.

The last part in particular showed clear differences in interpretation, according to the study. The face that smiles only slightly is perceived by some as friendly, others as passive-aggressive. There are also repeated reinterpretations, so that the slightly smiling face can also mean "I feel empty inside" or, for example, vegetable emojis, some of which contain a double meaning. New emojis would also change the meaning of previous ones if, for example, the new ones could express a feeling that previously had to be expressed with a makeshift solution. However, the participants were obvious: the emoji laughing tears, on the other hand, meant "funny" or "laughing".

The research team found that the participants rated more familiar emojis more positively emotionally and more clearly. The more visually complex a face is, the more unfamiliar and unclear the participants rated it. "Negative emojis are also more emotionally intense than positive ones," says co-author Tatjana Scheffler, a linguist at Ruhr University Bochum. The team has published the results in the journal Behavior Research Methods.