Do Emojis Really Help Language Learners? New Review Separates Warmth From Well-Being

A single smiling face appended to a teacher’s correction can change how a message lands. It can make feedback feel encouraging, or it can come across as patronizing, sarcastic, or simply irrelevant. That tiny pictographic symbol, so ubiquitous in digital chat, has long been assumed to humanize online education. But a new narrative conceptual review published in Frontiers in Psychology argues that the science behind that assumption is far thinner than the emoji itself, and that the leap from making a teacher seem friendlier to improving a language learner’s well-being is a leap the evidence does not yet support.

The review, led by Shamim Akhter of INTI International University in Malaysia with colleagues from Umm Al-Qura University in Saudi Arabia and Bahauddin Zakariya University in Pakistan, focuses on English as a Foreign Language (EFL) education, a setting where learners routinely wrestle with foreign language anxiety, embarrassment, and self-doubt alongside curiosity and social belonging. Language learning is an emotionally laden enterprise, and digital instruction strips away many of the vocal and bodily cues available in face-to-face interaction. Emojis are one of the few remaining resources for conveying warmth in text, alongside wording, punctuation, response timing, and interaction history. The question the authors pose is deceptively simple: when a learner sees an emoji in an instructional message, what actually happens psychologically, and how far can those effects travel?

To answer it, the team built a conceptual model grounded in self-determination theory, digital semiotics, broaden-and-build theory, and a multidimensional view of well-being. Self-determination theory identifies autonomy, competence, and relatedness as basic psychological needs that fuel motivation and well-being. In the proposed account, if an instructional cue is interpreted as responsive and respectful, it may contribute to perceived relatedness, which may in turn support more autonomous participation. Digital semiotics explains the earlier step: how an image acquires contextual meaning before it can enter any psychological pathway. Broaden-and-build theory supplies a conditional affective hypothesis, suggesting that when an interaction genuinely elicits positive emotion, that experience may facilitate exploratory action and, through repetition, resource development. The PERMA framework organizes the possible well-being outcomes, spanning positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning, and achievement.

The model’s entry point is interpretation. An emoji embedded in a message and attributed to a particular sender is read in relation to the text, the message purpose, the relationship history, and local conventions. That interpretation informs appraisals of communicative intent, warmth, appropriateness, and competence. The authors illustrate the stakes with constructed examples: adding a smiling face to the instruction “Please revise the final sentence” could suggest encouragement, but it could also appear patronizing if the learner has already expressed frustration. A wink might invite a playful reading or introduce uncertainty about whether the request is serious. Positive visual valence, they stress, cannot be equated with positive psychological impact, because a smile interpreted as sarcasm can reverse the expected direction of an affective response entirely.

Crucially, the review sorts the available evidence into four categories: direct emoji research in EFL, emoji research in other educational or language-learning settings, related emoticon research, and contextual digital-learning evidence without an isolated emoji component. The most directly relevant EFL finding concerns self-efficacy rather than well-being. Chen and Hsu, in 2022, combined a survey of 310 learners, an emoji-feedback study with 120 participants, and a smaller follow-up of 35, finding that positive emoji feedback in computer-assisted language learning could influence EFL learners’ self-efficacy. But self-efficacy is a belief about one’s capability to perform a task, not a direct measure of competence or well-being, and the study did not demonstrate the complete sequence from perceived teacher warmth to relatedness, reduced anxiety, and enduring well-being.

Evidence from higher education shows why outcomes must be separated. A welcome-email experiment reported by Vareberg and colleagues in 2023, involving 368 students, found that higher caring, immediacy, and liking impressions accompanied lower competence and trustworthiness impressions. Relational warmth and perceived instructional authority, in other words, can move in different directions. A 2024 observational survey of 348 Malaysian higher-education students by Sia and colleagues linked reported emoji use to instructor credibility, motivation, and perceived performance, but because these were self-reported relationships, the results cannot establish causal mediation or an emoji-specific effect on EFL anxiety. Meanwhile, Li and Zhong in 2025 found an advantage for semantically congruent emoji cues in an immediate matching task with 30 English-speaking learners of Chinese, supporting a bounded hypothesis about visual-semantic processing while leaving durable vocabulary acquisition and socio-emotional mediation untested.

The review also confronts the darker possibilities. Glikson and colleagues, in 2018, found that pictorial smileys in work-related first impressions could reduce perceived competence and did not reliably increase warmth, a finding that directly challenges the general assumption that adding a smiley necessarily humanizes communication. An emoji can introduce ambiguity when its apparent emotion conflicts with the text, or when a recipient reads it as irony, dismissal, or criticism. Overuse may make feedback seem formulaic, while a playful cue accompanying a serious concern may appear insensitive. Students may also feel pressure to reciprocate an instructor’s expressive style, and where platform rendering or assistive technology makes a cue difficult to interpret, the intended relational function may be lost altogether.

Culture enters the model as a boundary condition at the very first step. Emoji meaning is not fixed; it is co-constructed within social and cultural contexts of use, and the same symbol may carry different connotations for different users. Chen and colleagues in 2024 examined facial-emoji classification among 523 participants in the United Kingdom and China and found differences associated with culture, age, and gender. The authors argue that researchers should measure interpretive variation directly rather than assume that a nominally positive cue has a shared emotional meaning, and that national categories are an incomplete proxy for the communicative practices of particular learners. Norms about teacher authority and acceptable informality may further condition how an appraisal translates into willingness to respond.

From this synthesis, the review develops six testable propositions. Among them: an emoji pretested as appropriate and congruent with the message should increase perceived teacher warmth in a low-stakes exchange compared with an otherwise identical text-only message, evaluated alongside competence and trustworthiness, which may respond differently. Any relationship between emoji-enhanced feedback and subsequent participation should be partly explained by perceived responsiveness and relatedness satisfaction, measured after exposure and before the later outcome. Familiarity, perceived message-emoji congruence, and norms about instructional formality should moderate cue interpretation, with effects potentially attenuated or reversed when the cue is unfamiliar or judged inappropriate. Sender attribution should condition responses, meaning teacher, peer, and automated-source messages should be compared without assuming a fixed ranking. And repeated supportive exchanges may be associated with later well-being through sustained relatedness and engagement, but an isolated emoji exposure is not expected to establish this distal outcome.

The pedagogical implication is deliberate, context-sensitive communication rather than a recommendation to increase emoji frequency. An instructor considering a cue should identify its communicative purpose, assess whether learners are likely to share the intended interpretation, and weigh the seriousness of the message and the established relationship. Clear wording remains essential, and an emoji should supplement, never substitute for, an explanation of an error or substantive academic support. The authors propose emoji literacy activities in which learners compare the same message with different cues, explain alternative readings, or rewrite messages so their intention is clear without an emoji. For AI-generated feedback, they argue that automated sources should be identified and reviewed for congruence between wording and visual cues, since an emoji must not be treated as evidence of empathetic understanding by a system. Until randomized message experiments, classroom studies with repeated low-stakes feedback episodes, and preregistered longitudinal designs deliver the missing evidence, the framework is best used to organize questions and explain boundary conditions rather than to prescribe a generally beneficial emoji intervention. The educational significance of these small symbols, the review concludes, depends on how learners interpret the cue in relation to the message, the sender, and the communicative context, and that interpretation is where the science must now focus.

Subject of Research: The role of emojis as socio-emotional cues in English as a Foreign Language learning and their uncertain contribution to learner well-being

Article Title: Emojis as socio-emotional cues in EFL learning: a narrative conceptual review of affect, relatedness, and well-being

Article References: Akhter, S., Alzahrani, A., Prasad, R. D., & Shaheen, M. (2026). Emojis as socio-emotional cues in EFL learning: a narrative conceptual review of affect, relatedness, and well-being. Frontiers in Psychology, 17, Article 1873670. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1873670

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1873670

Keywords: emojis, EFL learning, socio-emotional cues, self-determination theory, learner well-being, digital communication, relatedness, willingness to communicate, positive psychology, educational psychology, language learner emotions, narrative review