A new study has shown that when it comes to developing closeness in your relationships, the emoji you send in your texts are doing some pretty heavy lifting.
You know emoji – the expressive visual shorthand for emotions and ideas. You also probably know the plural form can be 'emoji' or 'emojis;' I'm going with the former. What we didn't know much about until now was their ability to help build stronger connections with the people in our lives.
Eun Huh, a researcher in communication studies at The University of Texas at Austin, authored the paper on a study that appeared in PLOS One this week. Huh had 260 adults aged 23-67 years read two sets of 15 text message exchanges that were practically identical, save for the use of emoji in one set. Each participant was asked to imagine themselves as the sender of each message, and to see how they felt about their partner's replies in those texts.
The subjects then indicated how those messages made them feel about their 'partners' on a Likert scale, where they rated how much they agreed or disagreed with statements describing a range of perceptions, on a scale of 1 to 7. It turns out that emoji make people seem more responsive. This means emoji help signal attentiveness and emotional engagement.
That's big, because, according to Huh, perceived responsiveness leads to better relationship outcomes, like increased feelings of closeness, greater satisfaction with said relationship, and indirectly, higher likability. Unless you're in the honeymoon phase of any given relationship in your life, you could probably do with a boost in any or all of these factors.
Interestingly, the texts in the study used both face emoji that directly describe emotions, as well as non-face emoji like objects or symbols. The results show that the type of emoji that accompanied these texts didn't affect how people perceived responsiveness, as long as it was emotionally consistent with the message. Personal factors like the participants' age, gender, and their own level of emoji use didn't affect these findings either.
The findings also led Huh to theorize that in texts between people, emoji may not only serve as expressive devices, but also as signals of attentiveness and emotional engagement. That's compelling, particularly if you find it hard to let people close to you know that you're tuned in to your conversations with them.
Send more emoji, people.