In our modern lives, emojis have become punctuation marks of feeling. We don’t just say we’re sad — we drop a 😢. We don’t just flirt — we test the waters with a 😉. But according to a new study, how you use emojis says a lot more about you than you’d think.
Turns out, people who pepper their social media with the most emojis tend to have the lowest levels of “openness to experience”. In other words, the more emojis you use, the less open you may be.
What’s behind a 😊
The research, led by Shelia M. Kennison and her colleagues at Oklahoma State University and Loyola University Chicago, was deceptively simple in design. Across two waves of data collection, they surveyed nearly 900 university students and analyzed public posts from those who consented to sharing their X (formerly Twitter) accounts.
Using established psychological questionnaires, the team measured each student’s personality. Then, they used the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) tool to analyze the words in participants’ tweets. They then wrote code to count not just how many emojis they used, but also how varied those emojis were.
In both samples, the link between emoji use and openness to experience was clear. “Those reporting lower levels of openness use the most emojis,” the authors wrote. The association held true even after controlling for gender (which showed that women used more emojis than men).
Curiously, this study found no significant connection with any of the other Big Five traits — not extraversion, not agreeableness, not conscientiousness, and not neuroticism.
The semantics of emoji talk
Beyond personality, the researchers also probed the kinds of words emoji users posted.
People who used emojis more often tended to also use more words related to family, positive emotion, and sadness — but fewer words tied to insight or articles like “the” or “a”. In other words, emoji-heavy posts focused more on relationships and emotions, less on abstract ideas.
In the second, larger sample, emoji fans also used more “you” and “I” pronouns, more negations (like “no” and “not”), and more words about time, but fewer dictionary words overall. That last bit hints at something we’re all feeling. Emojis are slipping in to replace language, not just to decorate it. Our vocabulary is getting smaller, but it’s compensated by emojis.
Meanwhile, while emojis often serve as visual tone-setters, the researchers found only subtle signs that they were tied to expressing emotion. In one sample, they correlated with words about sadness and positivity, in another, with negations. This suggests that emojis are used as qualifiers rather than to communicate concepts. They act as rhetorical tools, softening or reinforcing emotional intent.
As the authors speculate, “It may reflect a communication strategy in which one uses emojis to soften the emotional impact of a negative sentiment.” For instance, if you’re saying something like “You’re never getting me to go to that restaurant again 😅.”
Why this matters
If you’re reading this, the odds are you spend a bit of time online. If you do that, the odds are you also use emojis quite a lot (or at the very least come across a lot of emojis). Internet users have carved their own type of language — one where a single 🧠 can mean “smart,” “mind-blown,” or “you’re overthinking this,” depending entirely on context.
Emojis are now integral to digital expression, acting as emotional amplifiers, rhetorical softeners, even stand-ins for entire sentences. They offer nuance in an otherwise flat medium. If you communicating with people online, you’ll want to be “fluent” in emoji.
But the implications go further than this.
The trait at the center — openness to experience — is one of psychology’s most robust predictors of behavior. It correlates with creative achievement, tolerance of ambiguity, and even political views. Lower openness, by contrast, can suggest a preference for the familiar and concrete over the abstract and novel.
Recruiters, marketers, and even dating apps increasingly rely on digital behavior to infer personality traits. If emoji use reliably signals low openness, it could inform algorithms — though the ethics of that are murky at best.
But online and emoji communication aren’t staying still. As meanings mutate — as 😂 morphs from joy to mockery, or 🙃 signals passive aggression rather than play — the way we use emojis will keep evolving. And so will what they reveal about us.
Read the full study here: Frontiers in Psychology
