小心！笑脸表情也有禁区

Signing off an email to a colleague with a chirpy smiley might be more contentious than you think.

你可能没想到，在发给同事的邮件中使用调皮的笑脸表情会引发这么大的争议。

Including smiley faces or similarly perky emojis may undermine information sharing and imply professional ineptitude, according to a new study by researchers at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel.

根据以色列内盖夫本古里安大学的一项新研究，笑脸或者类似的逗趣表情可能会影响收件人分享工作信息的意愿，且给人留下不专业的印象。

"Our findings provide first-time evidence that, contrary to actual smiles, smileys do not increase perceptions of warmth and actually decrease perceptions of competence," revealed Dr Ella Gilkson.

艾拉•吉尔科森博士表示：“我们的研究结果首次证明，与真正的微笑相反，笑脸表情不会给收件人更温暖的感觉，还会令他们对发件人的能力评判打折扣。”

"In formal business e-mails, a smiley is not a smile," the post-doctorate fellow in management revealed.

这位管理学博士后表示：“在正式的商务邮件中，笑脸表情不等于微笑。”

Researchers from BGU, the University of Haifa and Amsterdam University conducted a series of experiments with 549 participants, hailing from 29 different countries, according to a paper published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science.

《社会心理学与人格科学》期刊刊登的论文显示，本古里安大学、海法大学和阿姆斯特丹大学的研究人员对来自29个国家的549名参与者进行了一系列实验。

Participants were each required to read similar work-related emails from a stranger and subsequently evaluate their warmth and professional competence. Some of these included smileys, others didn’t.

每名参与者都需要阅读陌生人发来的相似的工作邮件，然后评估对方的热情程度和专业能力。这些邮件有的包含笑脸表情，有的没有。

Surprisingly, they found that the inclusion of smiley emojis had no impact on people’s perceptions of warmth and lowered their perceptions of competence.

令人惊讶的是，他们发现笑脸表情不会影响收件人感受到的热情程度，不过会对发件人留给对方的专业印象有不利影响。

"The study also found that when the participants were asked to respond to e-mails on formal matters, their answers were more detailed and they included more content-related information when the e-mail did not include a smiley," explained Dr. Glikson.

吉尔克森解释道：“研究还发现，参与者应要求回复公务邮件时，当电子邮件不包含笑脸符号时，他们会提供更详细、更相关的信息。”

"We found that the perceptions of low competence if a smiley is included in turn undermined information sharing," she said.

“我们发现，如果电子邮件中含有笑脸符号，那么他们会感到对方不专业，这会破坏他们分享信息的意愿。”

The study even showed that there's a glimmer of sexism in emoji usage.

研究还表明，使用表情符号还有一丝性别歧视的意味。

It revealed that when the gender of the email sender was unknown, recipients were more likely to presume that an email which included a smiley icon was sent by a woman.

研究透露，当发件人的性别未知时，收件人更倾向于认为含有笑脸符号的电子邮件发送者是女性。