Ilichev N.R., Shchebetenko S.A. Personality Traits Measured with Facial Expression Emojis and Their Relations to Big Five Traits and Life Outcomes

Modern researchers are increasingly exploring alternative methods for describing personality differences, as traditional language-based self-report measures suffer from numerous limitations, including cultural bias, social desirability effects, measurement inaccuracies, and other issues. Recent international studies suggest that emojis hold significant potential as a tool for psychometric personality assessment and could serve as a valid alternative to natural language-based questionnaires.

The aim of our study was to explore the potential of emojis as an alternative to conventional text-based questionnaires for measuring personality traits.

Initially, we extracted a set of 128 facial expression Unicode 14.0 emojis, presumably conveying personality traits. We developed instructions to assess personality through emojis, based on instructions from existing textual personality inventories. A sample of 595 volunteer respondents from Russia completed an online survey that contained a set of facial emojis, the Big Five Inventory-2 (BFI-2), and a series of items questioning respondents about various life events.

Upon redundancy check among emojis via unique-variance analysis, an exploratory graph analysis was conducted, which revealed a five-dimensional personality model based on 68 emojis. The resulting inventory was named the Emoji Personality List (EPL). The EPL model included the following factors: (1) Positive Expressiveness, (2) Negative Emotionality, (3) Unconventionality, (4) Detachment, and (5) Sickness. The model's internal structure was confirmed via confirmatory factor analysis, which indicated a good fit between the final structure and the collected data. The internal consistency of the obtained emoji scales ranged from α = 0.70 to α = 0.80. Subsequently, we examined the relations between the EPL dimensions and the Big Five domains. In addition, we investigated the concurrent contribution of the emoji dimensions in predicting various life outcomes using logistic and multiple regression models.

The results of the study demonstrate the potential of emoji-based tools in measuring and conceptualizing personality traits.

Key words: emoji, taxonomy, personality traits, trait theory, Big Five, psychometric properties, factor analysis, emoji factors, exploratory graph analysis

For citation: Ilichev, N.R., Shchebetenko, S.A. (2025). Personality Traits Measured with Facial Expression Emojis and Their Relations to Big Five Traits and Life Outcomes. New Psychological Research, No. 4, 80–102, DOI: 10.51217/npsyresearch_2025_05_04_04