Satisfaction surveys increasingly use emoticons, i.e. a sad frownie, neutral face and happy smiley. Some additionally use traffic-light color coding (red to green). Let’s asume there are good reasons in a scenario to use 5 instead of the usual 3 (or fewer) levels, much like in a classic Likert scale (which surveys by approval) or a semantic differential rating scale.

Is there a well tested (maybe even conventional or standardized) set of five emojis found in Unicode that

1. aligns naturally (across languages and cultures) on a qualitative scale from sad to happy when used together (relative context) and
2. has every symbol (across popular / OS-provided fonts and image sets) distinctive enough to be not misidentified when used alone (absolute context)?

I see that Emojiscore, for instance, uses 😄, 😊, 😐, 😟, 😩 (top to bottom). I would have chosen a slightly different set intuitively, e.g. 😡, ☹️, 😐, ☺️, 😍 (left to right). The linked Emojipedia articles show alternative renditions and a recent study examines how some of them are interpreted very differently.

Please note that mood surveys, like Facebook’s response additions to the Like button, are a slightly different topic: Readers select one out of a predefined set of categorical icons to represent their reaction, which usually cannot be put together on a linear scale.

Related questions

• Do emojis provide any value over emoticons? – asked in 2013 prior to Unicode standardization of Japanese telco emojis, about predefined (English) codes vs. arbitrary punctuation sequences
• How should a survey (Likert Scale) be presented in a mobile application?
• Is it better to use a Likert scale or Semantic Differential for gathering attitudes towards pages?