Emails can be pretty annoying.
Whether they’re work or personal, they fill up our inboxes and leave us feeling like we have a million and one people to answer to.
However, with personal emails, you can mostly be your gif-loving, emoji-filled self and nobody will bat an eyelid.
Take those emojis into work and it’s a completely different story.
According to new research in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, the more we use emojis in emails to work colleagues, the more they look down on us.
Oh no…
Yep, the smiley symbols rarely make a positive impact and can actually undermine the subject of your email.
The study saw 500 participants from 29 countries take part and they had some pretty simple tasks.
In a part of the experiment, all participants were asked to evaluate an email, with half of them having emojis and the other half not.
Surprisingly, the ones without emojis scored much higher, and while you might think a smiley face seems more friendly, it doesn’t and actually resulted in the email sender being thought of as “incompetent.”
Dr Ella Glikson, author of the study, told Stylist that while it may seem like putting an emoji in will lighten the mood, it will often have the opposite effect.
“Our findings provide first-time evidence that, contrary to actual smiles, smileys do not increase perceptions of warmth and actually decrease perceptions of competence,” she says.
“The study also found that when the participants were asked to respond to emails on formal matters, their answers were more detailed and they included more content-related information when the email did not include a smiley,” Ella finished.
Bet you’ll think twice before sending an emoji ever again.
