Psychology Today columnist Sebastian Ocklenburg summarized a recent study under the headline, The Dark Side of Emojis: A Surprising Link to Narcissism. Let's take a look.
It's a recent correlational study that tested the link between various personality traits and emoji use. (The empirical article can be found here.)
The columnist provides a straightforward summary of the study's method here:
To clarify this question, a new study, just published in the scientific journal Current Psychology, scientifically investigated the link between gender differences in emoji use and different personality variables (Kennison and co-workers, 2025). In the study, the research team, led by Shelia M. Kennison of Oklahoma State University, gathered data from 285 undergraduate students (135 male students, 145 female students, and 5 students with other genders). First, the scientists gathered information on the volunteers’ emoji use. The volunteers had to rate the frequency at which they used 40 different commonly used emojis when communicating. They were also asked how often they used emojis when writing text messages, social media posts, and replies to social media posts of other people.
Moreover, the scientists assessed different aspects of personality in the volunteers using questionnaires. These included the so-called Big Five (openness, extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and neuroticism), the Dark Triad (narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy), and sensation-seeking.
a) The headline of the column was "The Dark Side of Emojis: A Surprising Link to Narcissism.". Is this a frequency, association, or causal claim?
b) Based on what you've read so far, classify the variables in this study (hint: I've counted 10 variables).
Variable name |
Potential levels of this variable (if you don't know the numbers, you can say "low to high" |
Is this manipulated or measured? |
c) Was this study correlational or experimental?
Now let's read about the study's results. I'll present three findings:
...First, the results indicated that women used both positive and negative emojis more often than men did based on their responses about their usage of the 40 common emojis. Women also indicated that they used emojis more often than men when writing text messages, social media posts, and replies to social media posts of other people.
...higher emoji use was linked to higher narcissism in both women and men, with highly narcissistic women showing the most emoji use....
In terms of the Big Five, both men and women with higher extraversion reported more emoji use than introverted people.
d) Take a look at the three results above. Select two you'd like to sketch a graph of. Then set up the axes for each graph. Remember to label your axes mindfully, and think about whether a bar graph or a scatterplot is the best graphing approach.
e) Some of the results from this study showed moderators, and the moderator was gender. Here is one example of a moderator patterns in the results:
For men only, higher Machiavellianism was linked to more emoji use.
Sketch a graph of this moderator. Hint: Make a scatterplot (what will go on the x and y axes?), using one color or shape for men dots and another color/shape for women dots.
f) Here is another example of a moderator pattern:
For men only, it was also found that people with high neuroticism (indicating mood instability and difficulties dealing with negative emotions) specifically used more negative emojis than other people.
Sketch a graph of this moderator. Hint: Make a scatterplot (what will go on the x and y axes?), using one color or shape for men dots and another color/shape for women dots.