See that little yellow chap up top?
What does he mean to you? If you had to put his expression on a scale of one to five - one being 'Negative', five being 'Positive' - where would you stick him? Go on...
The cause of our questioning? In a recent study by the GroupLens Research team at the University of Minnesota, the "grinning face with smiling eyes" was found to be the most 'confused' of the emoji lexicon.
Depending on what platform you're using this little guy on, his apparent emotion can look very, very different - resulting in a whole heap of confusion.
While the Unicode group forms the universal language/code that ensures we all see the 'same' emoji faces, it's up to each platform to create their own artistic impression of the emoji. As you can see above, Apple and Facebook's version of 'grinning' is a lot more ambiguous than everyone else's. This resulted in study participants varying their interpretation of each representation of the emoji with a huge range of emotions.
Which can result in conversational cockups between different platforms such as the following...
The solution? Well, there isn't one really. Just be aware that the official name for this emoji is "Grinning face with smiling eyes".
It's happy, okay? It's correct use should be for an emotive response of excitement, joy or anything else that makes you grin.
Don't blame us, blame the artists at Facebook and Apple for being frustratingly obscure with their letterbox mouth design.
[Via: Grouplens]
