What your emoji use can say about your personality

Do you use emojis in your online communications, or do you shun them? Or use them sparingly?

The emojis you use and how often you use them might give some clues about your personality, according to a study run by Shelia Kennison, a professor of psychology at Oklahoma State University.

The study, published in the Current Psychology journal, asked 285 undergraduates, nearly all around the age of 20, to rate how frequently they used 40 of the most used emojis when messaging other people or posting on social media.

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Researchers drew parallels between emoji use and the participants’ answers to a questionnaire focusing on nine different personality types: openness, the Dark Triad (narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy), sensation-seeking, extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and neuroticism.

“We found relationships [between emoji use and personality] no one had found before,” Kennison tells Sunday Morning.

“The individuals that answered the questions with the highest level of narcissism, they ended up being ... the women reporting most frequent use of emojis,” she says.

“People who are high in narcissism tend to think they're special compared to other people. So I can imagine someone using emojis a lot just trying to be kind of cool and hip and being out there and that could be tapping into the sort of tendency to think they're special and what we label as narcissism.”

In contrast, high use of emojis in men was linked to Machiavellianism, which is the willingness to manipulate others to advance one’s own interests.

“It was very interesting that men and women’s personality traits related to their emoji use differed,” Kennison says.

The researchers explained the link between emoji use and personality traits, saying: “The rationale is that emoji use may be related to strategies to manipulate the perceptions of others and to present a positive impression of oneself.”

Extroverts also tended to use more emojis than introverts. Kennison believes this may be because introverts don’t feel the need to connect socially as much as extroverts.

Studies like this could be used to inform companies which analyse prospective employees’ social media posts to assess their suitability, she says.

“If somebody's using a lot of emojis like more than a basic amount, I think it could be used to infer their related personality traits.”

While she’s not sure if the same results could be applied to the older generation, she says the use of emojis has evolved to the extent that there can be some emoji “dialects” within subgroups.

“Last summer, my husband and I got an emoji sequence from our grandson and we really didn't know what it meant at all. We had to go ask somebody, what do these two emojis together mean? So it is like learning a language…

“Groups that communicate a lot, the way that they use the emojis could really evolve over time, almost like a dialect of usage for just their group. They use that emoji to mean that thing, but generally other people don't, so that's another great idea for future research.”

A previous study by Kennison on emojis also found frequent use of emojis and using a wider variety of them could be indicative of lower levels of imagination, adventurousness, curiosity, emotional awareness, interest in the arts and/or questioning of authority.