Psychology suggests adults who frequently use emojis when they text often aren't simply more playful — they may be unusually sensitive to the emotional tone of a conversation and more alert to how easily warmth disappears on a screen

Some people can’t send a three-word text without decorating it. “Running late 😬”. “Sounds good 🙌”. “Sorry about earlier 🥲”. It reads as padding, or as someone who never quite left school.

The research points somewhere else. Frequent emoji use tends to show up in people who are paying close attention to how a message will land, and who have noticed something most texters miss. Written warmth is fragile, and it disappears for reasons that have nothing to do with how the sender actually feels.

What the study actually found

In December 2024, a team led by Simon Dubé at the Kinsey Institute published a study in PLOS ONE looking at 320 adults recruited through Mechanical Turk. They measured how often people used emojis with friends, family and romantic partners, and compared that against attachment style and emotional intelligence.

Higher emotional intelligence went with more emoji use with friends. Avoidant attachment, which in plain English means discomfort with closeness and with relying on other people, went with fewer emojis with both friends and romantic partners. Women used emojis more than men, though only with friends and family.

Some caution is warranted. This is one correlational study on a sample the authors themselves describe as mostly white, educated, married, English-speaking and American. It can’t show that using emojis makes anyone more emotionally intelligent, and it shouldn’t be stretched into a claim about everyone. What it offers is a hint about who reaches for them.

Tone falls off a cliff in writing

Nearly twenty years ago, Justin Kruger and three colleagues ran five experiments on email. People writing messages were confident their sarcasm and their jokes would land. Their readers did considerably worse than the writers had predicted.

The explanation was egocentrism. You hear your own joke in your head with the eye roll and the vocal emphasis already attached, and you can’t easily strip all that out when imagining someone else reading the same words flat.

Punctuation does its own quiet damage. In 2016, Danielle Gunraj and colleagues at Binghamton University had students read short exchanges and rate them. A one-word reply like “Sure” or “Yup” was rated less sincere when it ended with a full stop. The identical words written by hand produced no such effect. Follow-up work from the same group found exclamation marks pushed perception in the opposite direction.

So the full stop, a mark everyone was drilled to use correctly, now reads on a phone screen as coldness. Nobody agreed to this. It simply happened, the way spoken slang happens, and anyone who didn’t get the memo is sending small cold signals all day without knowing it.

What emojis are doing

They put back some of the information the medium removed. A 🙂 after “sure” performs the job that a raised eyebrow or a warm tone performs in person. It tells the reader which version of “sure” this is.

Seen that way, the emoji-heavy texter is doing repair work. They have clocked that “Fine” can be read four ways, and they would rather not spend the afternoon wondering which one their sister landed on. All that decoration is tone control, even when nobody sat down and decided to build a system.

It usually isn’t a conscious strategy, just a habit built by people who’ve been misread before and didn’t enjoy it.

It also makes sense of the avoidant attachment finding. If closeness makes you uncomfortable, broadcasting warmth by accident is the last thing you want. Keeping your messages clean and flat holds everyone at a manageable distance.

Where it backfires

There is a cost, and it turns up at work. In 2018, Ella Glikson, Arik Cheshin and Gerben van Kleef ran experiments with 549 participants across 29 countries. A smiley in a formal work email lowered how competent the sender seemed. People replying to those emails also sent back less detailed information. A smiling photograph did the reverse, lifting both competence and friendliness.

A larger preregistered replication published in 2023, with 847 participants, complicates this a little. It found smileys did raise perceived warmth after all. But they still lowered perceived competence, and did so whether the setting was formal or casual.

The practical version: emojis buy warmth and cost authority. With a close friend, that is a cheap trade. In a first email to a new client, it is an expensive one.

How to use any of this

If someone floods you with emojis, try reading it as attentiveness rather than immaturity. They are probably managing how their message will feel to you, which is more thought than most people put into a text.

If you are a minimalist texter, understand that your neutrality isn’t arriving as neutral. “Ok.” is doing damage you never authorised. Adding a single character costs nothing and prevents a surprising amount of low-grade friction.

Match the channel. Use warmth with friends and family, hold back in a first professional email, and relax once an actual relationship is established.

When something genuinely matters, stop texting. Tone repair has limits, and a difficult conversation compressed into a phone screen is where most of the real damage gets done. Call instead.

And when you can’t tell, ask. “Are you annoyed with me?” costs one message and saves two days of guessing. Most people will tell you the truth, and the ones who were annoyed usually appreciate being asked.