The Secret of WeChat Emoji...

What does Becca mean?

a. It really doesn’t matter, I can wait.
b. That’s not cool, I’m leaving.

Hey emoji user, guess you also encounterd with this situation once or twice. How come a simple message could be interpreted into two meanings that are way too different? Guess this is the culprit!

There’s a bunch of WeChat users complain about this smiling face emoji, say it doesn’t look quite friendly. Generally, young people are more tend to dislike this emoji, using it when expressing negative sentiments like satire, helplessness, speechlessness, while the middle-aged users and the elders feel good about it, see it as a normal smile emoji.

Apparently it causes miscommunication between users from different age groups. Instead of the smile emoji that we mentioned at the beginning of this article, young people use emoji like grinning when expressing happiness or excitement.

Why this smiling face seems so FAKE and makes people feel uncomfortable? Most people agree that the crux of the matter is the eyes.

People always narrow their eyes when having a REAL smile, like these smiling or laughing emojis in WeChat: And let’s see some other emoji renderings, they all make people feel joyful, with their eyes narrowed. Now have a look at this:
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Wow...!!! Kind of frightening, isn't it?

This little yellow face has his eyes widely open, while dropping down his pupils, normally we call it a “blank stare”. This kind of look is usually read as negative emotions.

See following emojis: And maybe this...
Not feeling quite cozy right?
Then how about these, do they feel better?
And this!
So much better with his sunglasses covering those vacant eyes. What’s more, an investigation found surprisingly that people interpret emoji renderings quite differently even though these emojis all have same grinning face and smiling eyes. GroupLens from University of Minnesota released a report in April this year. To conduct survey, they chose 5 platform renderings (Apples, Google, Microsoft, Samsung, LG) of 22 of the most popular anthropomorphic (i.e., human-looking) emojis. They asked the participants to describe the emoji renderings in words, also to assess the emotional meaning or sentiment on a scale from -5 (strongly negative) to 5 (strongly positive). The result turned out to be like this:

Apple emoji got even a negative score！

Here’s an interpretation that people generally have for this Apple emoji:

The interpretations towards the same emoji are varied from people to people, it could be determined by cultural background, age group and many other factors.

Here are some more emojis from WeChat, and their "Official" Meanings and "Real" meanings:



In the end, let's go back to this emoji.
We are not saying that using this smiling face emoji is inappropriate, and there’s no so-called “official” meaning or “real” meaning. The meaning of this emoji, also the others with controversy among people, is only based on personal interpretation which could be quite diverse.

Though many of the young people in China use this emoji as a negative rendering, there is still quite a bunch of people use it when try to convey their kindness, so don't be upset when people send you this. But next time you have a conversation with people on WeChat, try to comprehend the emojis he or she send in the context of full text message, it may help to avoid a good deal of the potential for miscommunication.

Have fun with emojis!