Exploring Gender Differences in Emoji Usage: Implications for Human-Computer Interaction (2025)

Abstract: This study discusses the emojis employment that compensate for the absence of supralinguistic emotive cues in digital communication. Analyzing gender relations (Male-to-Male, Male-to-Female, Female-to-Male, Female-to-Female) as a social influence factor in emoji use, the research explores the use of anger-related emojis and their dual functions as emotion signals and intensifiers. Findings reveal women use more intense emojis toward men and less severe ones toward women, a pattern not observed in men when emphasizing emotions. Hence, the study contributes to the conceptual application of emotional expression via emojis within digital media, raising sentiments on gender variances and improving emotional intelligence in artificial intelligence systems to yield a more accurate human feeling interpretation.

## introduction in everyday life, humans can engage directly with one another in a variety of ways, including gestures, facial expressions, and tone of conversation. however, based on current internet growth, online interactions lack supralinguistic communication mechanisms, resulting in communication challenges between communicators because language expression alone cannot accurately convey the entire mood @xcite . thus, emojis, the small digital pictures or graphic symbols, were born to represent things, feelings, or concepts in communication software. in fact, the rise of emojis has changed the way internet users communicate, which has not only affected the attention of linguists to this issue but has also led to new changes in the way internet users communicate. @xcite reported an increase of 30% to 40% in emojis on instagram, a type of communication software, compared to two to three years earlier, demonstrating the importance of the role of emojis in online dialogue. this research analyzes the role of the "emotion signal emoji" and the "emotion intensifier emoji" summarized in @xcite . specifically, "emotion signal emoji" refers to the emoji that describes the emotion not previously mentioned, while "emotional intensifier emoji" refers to the emoji that characterizes the mentioned emotion (usually contains direct emotional words). previously, @xcite revealed the differences in the cognitive expressions of emojis by gender, while @xcite found gender differences in emoji employment. specifically, females use emojis more frequently than males @xcite . to investigate the gender variances, this study examines deeper at gender (male and female) and emoji usage interaction under angry scenarios for taiwanese participants. the present study evaluates four gender relationships-male-to-male (mtom), male-to-female (mtof), female-to-male (ftom), and female-to-female (ftof)-to explore the following four research questions: ## conclusion the study found notable differences in how men and women express anger through emojis. women use stronger emojis when communicating with men and less intense ones with women, potentially because women are more emotional and sensitive to emotions compared to men @xcite . women also choose more intense emojis in interrogative sentences than in affirmative sentences. this study proposes two explanations for this result: first, women may unconsciously treat the recipient as a man during the conversation, resulting in an enhanced situation. second, the "?" in question sentences may be an "emotion intensifier symbol," which has an emotion-enhancing effect on women that is different from other sentence structures. today, the activeness of online conversations has led to communications between humans and artificial intelligence, among which the ability of artificial intelligence to distinguish emotions is highly valued for its development. based on the results of this study, the expression of emotions by men and women is affected by sentence patterns. if the gender is different, will artificial intelligence provide different responses? since the scale of this study is not large enough to cover all internet users worldwide, some results need to be confirmed. however, this study provides a preliminary discussion on the emotion of data-emojis, pioneering first-hand research into the new generation's communication.