The present study extends previous research by investigating affective ratings of emoji, emoticons and human faces and by direct comparison between them. Also, emoji and emoticons have been investigated recently for their affective significance. Previous studies investigated affective judgments of pictures, faces, and words suggesting that these stimuli show a typical distribution along the big two emotion dimensions of valence and arousal. Thus, their meaning relies on the context of the message in which they are embedded. However, compared with real faces, pictures or words, many emoji are ambiguous because they do not symbolize a discrete emotion or feeling state.

An important function of emoji as communicative symbols is to convey emotional content from sender to receiver in computer-mediated communication, e.