“It has been scientifically proven that the more you smile the more people like you, but it turns out this this pattern might not necessarily translate all that well in the language of emoji,” TheNextWeb reports. “Researchers from the University of Amsterdam, the University of Haifa and the Ben-Gurion University in Israel have discovered that using smiley face emoticons in formal business communication could be causing your colleagues and customers to doubt your brains.”
“‘Our findings provide first-time evidence that, contrary to actual smiles, smileys do not increase perceptions of warmth and actually decrease perceptions of competence,’ Ben-Gurion’s post-doctorate fellow Dr. Ella Glikson told EurekAlert. ‘In formal business e-mails, a smiley is not a smile,'” TNW reports. “The outcome revealed that, contrary to smiling in person, the smiley emoticons had no effect on these aspects in online communication. In fact, the researchers discovered that smiley face emoji bore a negative impact on the receiver’s perception of the sender.”
“The experiment also showed that, when anonymous, senders who included smiley face emoticons in their emails were often presumed to be women” TNW reports. “This, however, had no relation to the evaluation of the individual’s competence or friendliness factors.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: What about this one?
[3:13pm EDT: Fixed link. Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “thetheloniousmac” for the heads up.]