Research says using smiley face emojis in work e-mails could jeopardize your career. A university in Israel reports that people putting emojis in work mails are likely to be thought of as being incompetent. Researchers did experiments on 549 people from 29 countries to check their reaction to emojis. The people had to evaluate the competence and warmth of the e-mail writer. Dr Ella Glikson said: "Contrary to actual smiles, smileys do not increase perceptions of warmth and actually decrease perceptions of competence….In formal business e-mails, a smiley is not a smile."
Other research shows that emojis are often misunderstood. This is related to how the reader or viewer understands the emoji. In other cases, technological problems could mean that an emoji typed by the writer is shown differently in the e-mail read by the reader. This is because the writer and reader use different software or operating system for their devices. Emojis started in Japan in the late 1990s. They quickly became very popular. More than six billion of them are sent every day around the world. There is even a World Emoji Day, which is on July the 17th every year.