Emoji & Psychological Research: Introducing Team Emoji

Written by Professor Linda K. Kaye, Professor of Psychology, Edge Hill University, United Kingdom.

Almost two decades since their introduction to the wider world, emoji still seem as popular as ever. Additionally, there is no shortage of research that is being conducted to explore the psychology behind these fascinating digital pictographs.

As always, there is a keen focus on topics such as how emoji relate to emotional and social experiences when used both in personal and corporate communication. There also appears to be increasing interest in Gen Z, a generation widely discussed as being noticeably different from older generations in their attitudes, preferences and habits. In relation to emoji, researchers are finding that Gen Z are using emoji to transform managerial communications, as well as motivate semantic shifts in emoji use within personal communications.

Finally, it wouldn't be 2026 without mentioning AI, especially the way emoji may help improve language fit between humans and chatbots, and how they're being used with AI chatbots to support mental health.

Introducing Team Emoji

Team Emoji is an international team of researchers and practitioners who are enthusiastic about the emotional experiences of emoji. Members span the UK, Ireland, Spain, Portugal and Australia.

Some of our projects are focused on answering questions such as:

• Are emoji actually emotional?
• What are the attentional processes associated with processing emoji faces?
• What are the sensory experiences associated with emoji?

We have a wide range of expertise across psycholinguistics, grounded cognition, visual attention, face processing, and applied emoji practices (e.g., brand communication, emoji dictionary). Our shared expertise complements our various collaborative research programmes, and our work has been published in peer-reviewed academic journals as well as represented widely in national and international media.

Team Emoji is currently exploring the sensory experiences associated with emoji. Essentially, we are focused on understanding how strong our perceptions are of concepts represented in emoji across different sensory modalities (touch, hearing, smell, taste, vision and interoception). This helps us understand the richness of our experiences within digital communication, and how we mentally represent emoji in the mind.

Are emoji emotional?

One of the key questions that motivates our research is whether emoji are actually emotional or not. It seems like a basic question, but it's pretty fundamental given how often we assume them to be so in everyday communication.

One way to research this is to see whether participants process emoji in a similar way to other emotional stimuli, such as emotion-laden words (e.g., victory, disease) or faces depicting emotion. We know that emotion-laden stimuli often have a "processing advantage" over neutral stimuli, meaning we tend to be faster and more accurate when categorising them. So if emoji are also emotional, it should be easier for us to process emoji which are more emotionally-laden than those which are more neutral.

We asked participants to take part in a categorisation task presenting a series of emoji varying in positivity, negativity or neutrality. We found that participants did not respond to emotionally-laden emoji (happy or sad) more efficiently than neutral ones. This suggests emoji may not be processed emotionally on an unconscious level, and instead we might need more conscious processing to bring in emotional interpretation and labelling.

You can read the academic paper here or watch a short animation of the work here.

Do emoji help us process sentences?

If face emoji are processed emotionally, we might expect that adding emoji to sentences or words would support how we process the accompanying text.

The key concept here is congruence: whether the emotion or pleasantness of the emoji matches the emotion of the accompanying words. We would expect that congruent pairings (matched by emotion) are easier for people to process than mismatched ones. So positive words should be processed more easily when accompanied by positive emoji compared to negative emoji, and vice versa for negative words.

We ran a categorisation task presenting participants with a series of words and non-words, randomly paired with happy, sad or neutral emoji. We found that pairing a happy emoji with a happy word did not help participants process the word any more efficiently than pairing it with no emoji or a negative one. The same was true for negative words.

Our findings suggest that emoji are not interpreted automatically as emotional, otherwise we would have seen some processing "boost" from congruence between words and emoji. Instead, it seems we need more deliberate, conscious processing of emoji for them to be interpreted or labelled emotionally.

You can read the academic paper here or watch a short animation of the work here.

Are emoji valid indicators of in-the-moment mood?

Can we detect people's mood from their use of emoji? This is something we explored in collaboration with Tina Schweiger, CEO of Feelalytics. We collected 682 in-the-moment mood assessments using an emoji mood scale, to explore whether emoji might be a suitable way to measure mood compared to more traditional mood scales.

The emoji mood scale replicated a standardised scale called the PANAS (Watson et al., 1988), but asked participants to report the degree to which emoji, rather than words, represented their current mood state. We also measured respondents' personality traits of extraversion, openness, conscientiousness, emotional stability and agreeableness.

Overall, we found that mood reports on the emoji mood scale were related to the corresponding item on the PANAS scale, suggesting mood was reported equivalently regardless of whether it was captured via emoji or words. However, this relationship didn't hold when we looked at personality: for those high in emotional stability and extraversion, there were very few associations between emoji and word versions of the mood scales. This suggests emoji may not always be a useful or reliable means of reporting in-the-moment mood.

You can read the paper here.

Closing Emoji Generation Gaps

Emoji aren't just playful, decorative icons; they can be a functional part of semantic, emotional and/or interpersonal communication. While there are still ongoing debates about their primary function (or indeed, to what extent they might simultaneously serve parallel functions), their use and interpretation are malleable and continually being shaped by society.

Studying emoji matters because we need to better understand the diversity in how they're used and interpreted, so we're better placed to reduce miscommunication and misinterpretation in everyday communication.

One of the most evident diversity gaps is between ages and generations, which is where the biggest risks for miscommunication lie. The "thumbs up" emoji, when used as a reaction, has been the subject of debate here: younger generations increasingly dismiss it as an acceptable part of communication, with some Gen Z users describing it as abrupt and lacking warmth.

This calls for research that can more systematically explore the social norms of emoji use and interpretation across generations, to help us better understand where these diversities exist and how they relate to communication effectiveness and social relationships. This is just one example of how emoji science can help close communication gaps in everyday interactions.

The Psychology of Emoji Processing

My 2025 book, “The Psychology of Emoji Processing”, is designed as a go-to resource to help you understand how we process emoji. It provides a comprehensive review of the state of play of what we know on the subject.

In the book, I take the reader through the theoretical frameworks, conceptual approaches and methodological approaches that have been used across a broad range of disciplines to study how we process emoji, with practical toolkits and advice on where to start with your own research.