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Men and women also tended to give this profile fewer “impressed” ratings and said they were less interested in dating that person.

The study didn’t try to determine why people associated excessive emoji use with lower intelligence, but Lynne Honey, the chair of MacEwan’s psychology department and Raymond’s faculty advisor for the project, speculated that it is related to the way people use language in general.

“People who use language poorly — we tend to perceive their intelligence as lower,” she said.

“If you’re throwing in things that make your message confusing, then we think that’s going to be tied to how your intelligence is perceived.”

The mixture of text and too many emojis likely increased the ambiguity of the profile.

The profile types that contained two simple emoticons and redundant emojis, which complemented but did not replace the text, tended to be perceived as more intelligent, compared to the control.

“This suggests that emoji use is especially important because it’s going to have an effect on whether or not people are interested in a relationship with you,” Raymond said.

The study did have several limitations, including a large imbalance between the number of male (182) and female (510) participants. The average age of those participants was 20.17 years old, so results can’t be compared across generations. Since older adults tend to have different expectations and preferences in mate choice than younger adults, it’s likely they respond differently to emoji use as well.

Future studies could pull data from real profiles or focus on different traits entirely. Online dating is becoming increasingly popular but scholarship on emojis in this context is still nascent.

“There’s been such an explosion in the use of emojis that the research hasn’t caught up with it yet,” Honey said.