Exploring Affective Properties of Emojis: Identifying the Persian Emoji Lexicon

Rezaee, Zoha; Hatami, Javad; Karsazi, Hossein; Malekar, KImia; Rezapour, Tara

doi:10.22059/jcsr.2025.392645.1010

Exploring Affective Properties of Emojis: Identifying the Persian Emoji Lexicon

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

¹ Department of Cognitive Psychology, Institute for Cognitive Science Studies (ICSS), Tehran, Iran.

² Department of Psychology, Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran.

³ Department of Cognitive Psychology, Institute for Cognitive Science Studies (ICSS), Tehran, Iran

10.22059/jcsr.2025.392645.1010

Abstract

Aims: The present study aimed to validate the Persian Emoji Lexicon (PEL) and examine gender and cultural differences in the perception of the affective properties of selected emojis.

Method: The study consisted of two phases: emoji selection and an online survey. First, we identified the 109 most frequently used emojis on Twitter. In the second phase, we assessed emotion and valence ratings from a sample of 200 X users (140 females; 27.3 ± 3.5 years).

Results: Of the 109 selected emojis, 90 were perceived as having a positive valence. Gender comparisons revealed that women rated significantly higher emotional intensity across all eight emotion dimensions compared to men. We also compared our findings with a similar database validated among Canadians. The inter-rater reliability for emoji valence ratings between Iranian and Canadian participants showed a fair level of agreement (Kappa coefficient = 0.357), while also highlighting significant cultural differences in emotion perception.

Conclusion: This database serves as a valuable resource for sentiment analysis of social media texts containing emojis, as well as for practical applications where emojis function as emotional cues to influence behavior (e.g., in marketing and education).

Keywords

Main Subjects

Social & Shared Cognition

References

Abbruzzese, L., Magnani, N., Robertson, I. H., & Mancuso, M. (2019). Age and gender differences in emotion recognition. Frontiers in psychology, 10, 2371.

Aduragba, O. T., Yu, J., Cristea, A. I., & Shi, L. (2022). Detecting fine-grained emotions on social media during major disease outbreaks: health and well-being before and during the Covid-19 pandemic. AMIA annual symposium proceedings,

Babchuk, W. A., Hames, R. B., & Thompson, R. A. (1985). Sex differences in the recognition of infant facial expressions of emotion: The primary caretaker hypothesis. Ethology and Sociobiology, 6(2), 89-101.

Bai, Q., Dan, Q., Mu, Z., & Yang, M. (2019). A systematic review of emoji: Current research and future perspectives. Frontiers in psychology, 10, 2221.

Bar, M., Neta, M., & Linz, H. (2006). Very first impressions. Emotion, 6(2), 269.

Chen, Y., Yang, X., Howman, H., & Filik, R. (2024). Individual differences in emoji comprehension: Gender, age, and culture. PloS one, 19(2), e0297379.

Choi, J., Shim, S.-H., & Kim, S. (2023). The power of emojis: The impact of a leader’s use of positive emojis on members’ creativity during computer-mediated communications. PloS one, 18(5), e0285368.

Cochran, W. G. (1954). Some methods for strengthening the common χ 2 tests. Biometrics, 10(4), 417-451.

Connolly, H. L., Lefevre, C. E., Young, A. W., & Lewis, G. J. (2019). Sex differences in emotion recognition: Evidence for a small overall female superiority on facial disgust. Emotion, 19(3), 455.

Dalle Nogare, L., Cerri, A., & Proverbio, A. M. (2023). Emojis are comprehended better than facial expressions, by male participants. Behavioral Sciences, 13(3), 278.

Fernández-Gavilanes, M., Juncal-Martínez, J., García-Méndez, S., Costa-Montenegro, E., & González-Castaño, F. J. (2018). Creating emoji lexica from unsupervised sentiment analysis of their descriptions. Expert Systems with Applications, 103, 74-91.

Ferré, P., Haro, J., Pérez-Sánchez, M. Á., Moreno, I., & Hinojosa, J. A. (2023). Emoji-SP, the Spanish emoji database: Visual complexity, familiarity, frequency of use, clarity, and emotional valence and arousal norms for 1031 emojis. Behavior research methods, 55(4), 1715-1733.

Fischer, A. H., Kret, M. E., & Broekens, J. (2018). Gender differences in emotion perception and self-reported emotional intelligence: A test of the emotion sensitivity hypothesis. PloS one, 13(1), e0190712.

Fischer, B., & Herbert, C. (2021). Emoji as affective symbols: affective judgments of emoji, emoticons, and human faces varying in emotional content. Frontiers in psychology, 12, 645173.

Forni-Santos, L., & Osório, F. L. (2015). Influence of gender in the recognition of basic facial expressions: A critical literature review. World Journal of Psychiatry, 5(3), 342.

Gantiva, C., Sotaquirá, M., Araujo, A., & Cuervo, P. (2020). Cortical processing of human and emoji faces: an ERP analysis. Behaviour & information technology, 39(8), 935-943.

Gao, B., & VanderLaan, D. P. (2020). Cultural influences on perceptions of emotions depicted in emojis. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, 23(8), 567-570.

Godard, R., & Holtzman, S. (2022). The Multidimensional Lexicon of Emojis: A New Tool to Assess the Emotional Content of Emojis. Frontiers in psychology, 13.

Guntuku, S. C., Li, M., Tay, L., & Ungar, L. H. (2019). Studying cultural differences in emoji usage across the east and the west. Proceedings of the international AAAI conference on web and social media,

Hampson, E., van Anders, S. M., & Mullin, L. I. (2006). A female advantage in the recognition of emotional facial expressions: Test of an evolutionary hypothesis. Evolution and human behavior, 27(6), 401-416.

Herring, S. C., & Dainas, A. R. (2020). Gender and age influences on interpretation of emoji functions. ACM Transactions on Social Computing, 3(2), 1-26.

Jaeger, S. R., Roigard, C. M., Jin, D., Vidal, L., & Ares, G. (2019). Valence, arousal and sentiment meanings of 33 facial emoji: Insights for the use of emoji in consumer research. Food research international, 119, 895-907.

Kennison, S. M., Fritz, K., Hurtado Morales, M. A., & Chan-Tin, E. (2024). Emoji use in social media posts: relationships with personality traits and word usage. Frontiers in psychology, 15, 1343022.

Koch, T. K., Romero, P., & Stachl, C. (2022). Age and gender in language, emoji, and emoticon usage in instant messages. Computers in Human Behavior, 126, 106990.

Kralj Novak, P., Smailović, J., Sluban, B., & Mozetič, I. (2015). Sentiment of emojis. PloS one, 10(12), e0144296.

Kutsuzawa, G., Umemura, H., Eto, K., & Kobayashi, Y. (2022). Classification of 74 facial emoji’s emotional states on the valence-arousal axes. Scientific Reports, 12(1), 398.

Landis, J. R., & Koch, G. G. (1977). An application of hierarchical kappa-type statistics in the assessment of majority agreement among multiple observers. Biometrics, 363-374.

Liao, W., Zhang, Y., Huang, X., Xu, X., & Peng, X. (2021). “Emoji, I can feel your pain”–neural responses to facial and Emoji expressions of pain. Biological Psychology, 163, 108134.

Lin, T. S., & Luo, Y. (2023). Health persuasion through emoji: How emoji interacted with information source to predict health behaviors in COVID-19 situation. SSM-population health, 21, 101343.

McClure, E. B. (2000). A meta-analytic review of sex differences in facial expression processing and their development in infants, children, and adolescents. Psychological bulletin, 126(3), 424.

McHugh, M. L. (2013). The chi-square test of independence. Biochemia medica, 23(2), 143-149.

Mo, C., Cristofori, I., Lio, G., Gomez, A., Duhamel, J.-R., Qu, C., & Sirigu, A. (2022). Culture-free perceptual invariant for trustworthiness. PloS one, 17(2), e0263348.

Mohammad, S. M., & Turney, P. D. (2013). Nrc emotion lexicon. National Research Council, Canada, 2, 234.

Mohan, S. N., Mukhtar, F., & Jobson, L. (2021). An exploratory study on cross-cultural differences in facial emotion recognition between adults from Malaysia and Australia. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 12, 622077.

Neel, L. A., McKechnie, J. G., Robus, C. M., & Hand, C. J. (2023). Emoji alter the perception of emotion in affectively neutral text messages. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 47(1), 83-97.

Paggio, P., & Tse, A. P. P. (2022). Are Emoji Processed Like Words? An Eye‐Tracking Study. Cognitive Science, 46(2), e13099.

Plutchik, R. (1960). The multifactor-analytic theory of emotion. the Journal of Psychology, 50(1), 153-171.

Riordan, M. A. (2017). The communicative role of non-face emojis: Affect and disambiguation. Computers in Human Behavior, 76, 75-86.

Rodrigues, D., Prada, M., Gaspar, R., Garrido, M. V., & Lopes, D. (2018). Lisbon Emoji and Emoticon Database (LEED): Norms for emoji and emoticons in seven evaluative dimensions. Behavior research methods, 50, 392-405.

Scheffler, T., & Nenchev, I. (2024). Affective, semantic, frequency, and descriptive norms for 107 face emojis. Behavior research methods, 56(8), 8159-8180.

Sullivan, S., Campbell, A., Hutton, S. B., & Ruffman, T. (2017). What’s good for the goose is not good for the gander: Age and gender differences in scanning emotion faces. Journals of Gerontology Series b: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences, 72(3), 441-447.

Statista. (Year). X (formerly Twitter) - statistics & facts. Statista. https://www.statista.com/topics/737/twitter/#topicOverview

Thompson, A. E., & Voyer, D. (2014). Sex differences in the ability to recognise non-verbal displays of emotion: A meta-analysis. Cognition and Emotion, 28(7), 1164-1195.

Viola, M. (2024). Almost Faces?;-) Emoticons and Emojis as Cultural Artifacts for Social Cognition Online. Topoi, 1-12.

Willis, J., & Todorov, A. (2006). First impressions: Making up your mind after a 100-ms exposure to a face. Psychological science, 17(7), 592-598.