A study published in 2017 from the University of Michigan and Peking analyzed 427 million WhatsApp and SMS messages from four million smartphone users in 212 countries to try to decipher whether the use of these popular visual signs known as emojis is uniformly universal. or if it varies from one culture to another. The result is that the face with tears of joy is the most used emoji in the world, with the exception of France, where the number one is taken by the heart .
Today, two years later, pages like Emojitracker (which counts the use of Twitter emojis in real time) continue to count this expressive icon with tears in its eyes as the most used, followed by the face that throws a heart-shaped kiss .
“Emojis are everywhere. They have become a universal language that cuts across all cultures,” according to Wei Ai, one of the lead authors of the 2017 study, and a doctoral student at the University of Michigan School of Information. . Ai and her colleagues found the joyous face to be the most popular emoji: its use accounted for 15.4% of the total use of symbols. It was followed by the symbol of the heart and the face with heart-shaped eyes.
According to the research, the French are the ones who use the most emojis : they include one in 20% of their messages , followed by Russians and Americans. Following the cliché that France is the country of love , the heart is the symbol most used by them, while in other countries they use symbols of faces. The researchers explored other cultural differences when using emojis and found that countries with high rates of individualism, such as Australia, France and the Czech Republic, used happy symbols by an overwhelming difference. In contrast, citizens of countries where individuals and families are more integrated and united, such as Mexico, Chile, Peru and Colombia, are more likely to express sadness, anger and negative feelings.
Societies that are more oriented to thinking about the long-term future, such as France, Hungary and Ukraine, with persistent personalities, hardly use negative emojis. In contrast, more forgiving societies such as Mexico, Colombia, Chile and Argentina use them more often.
