Using Emojis at Work? You're Not Going to Like This Study 😮

So, crying-laughing emoji, you’re not going to believe this—but, spiral-eyes emoji, a psychological experiment has found that incorporating emojis into your workplace communiqués might be leading your peers to perceive you as incompetent. But not always: the mercurial purple devil emoji, as always, is in the details. Researchers at the University of Ottawa tested the reactions of 243 adult volunteers (134 men and 109 women) to a battery of hypothetical corporate instant messages, some with emojis, some without, to gauge the average response to the inclusion of these pictographic symbols. While messages without emoji were, far and away, deemed to be the most professional, emojis with a clear positive vibe paired with a positive or neutral text message also tended to enhance the test subject’s assessment of the sender’s competence. There were gender dynamics at play, too. Women were more likely to judge negative IMs with emoji more harshly if they were ostensibly sent by women, compared to similar negative messages and emojis sent by men. But this trend was also seen in workplace IMs sent without emojis. “Emojis are not simply neutral add-ons to text messages; they can influence how

Apr 9, 2026 → Apr 9, 2026