We're all guilty of firing off three crying laughing faces in a row instead of typing "that's so funny", or using the sassy nail painting emoji when we're acting like an absolute queen.

But researchers have found in a new study that the digital image of a smiley face can in fact have a negative result when used in the workplace.

"Our findings provide first-time evidence that, contrary to actual smiles, smileys do not increase perceptions of warmth and actually decrease perceptions of competence," scientists said, adding that:

"In formal business e-mails, a smiley is not a smile." Oh.

The study found that people replied with more detailed and intellectual responses to an email that didn't include an emoji, signalling that the use of emojis led to an appearance of incompetence.

The study also found that when the gender of the email sender wasn't known, emails that included a smiley face were more likely to be presumed to have been sent by a woman. 

Guess we will stick to the formalities so.

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