Jerusalem (CNN) Pro tip: Keep the smiley faces out of your work emails, or else the person receiving the message may think you're incompetent.

That's according to a study published in "Social Psychological and Personality Science." It calls itself "the first systematic investigation of the effects of smileys on first impression formation in work settings."

As emoticons and other visual representations of language make their way into traditionally text-based communications such as emails and text messages, Ella Glikson, along with co-authors Arik Cheshin and Gerben A. van Kleef, wanted to study the effect the emoticons on the meaning of the message.

"I was very optimistic about the positive power of emoticons. But our initial results surprised me. So we focused on the specific effect of smileys on first impression in work context, and our results were very consistent across different experiments," Glikson told CNN in an email.

'A smiley is not a smile'

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