Emoji, those ubiquitous little pictographs that give text messages and chats added emotional punch, are used by people worldwide to express a range of sentiments from hilarity to disgust.
A new study on global emoji usage conducted by the researchers at the University of Michigan and Peking University analyzed 427 million messages from 4 million smartphone users in 212 countries to reveal which countries love which emojis best.
The results are considered to be the first large-scale analysis of emoji usage.
Surprisingly, the Czech Republic, a country known for its pessimism, was not among countries that typically send the most negative emojis. Those are Mexico, Chile, Peru, and Colombia, nations where researchers have observed ties among individuals to be particularly strong.
Countries with high levels of individualism overwhelmingly tend to use the happy emojis, the study says.
The Czech Republic fell into the happy-emoji camp along with Australia, Hungary, and France.
The most popular emoji used worldwide, including here in the Czech Republic, is “face with tears of joy.” It made up 15.4 percent of the total symbols in the study. Heart emoji and heart-eyes emoji are the second- and-third most used, respectively.
Wei Ai, one of the lead authors of the study said: “Emojis are everywhere. They are becoming the ubiquitous language that bridges everyone across different cultures.”