The picture above shows Katy Perry and John Mayer looking at each other with some semblance of mutual amusement.
She's animated and looks like she's full LOL-ing, but he's a bit guarded with his humor—much like the smirk emoji with the quizzical eyebrows. This alone, of course, isn't why these two broke up again, but our e-laughing styles do say something about us. (Come to think of it, though, K.P. is a big fan of emojis. Is that why coupling is a tricky thing?)
Facebook recently conducted a study to give us some insight into the "not-so-universal language of laughter." The social media site looked at user data from the last week of May, and they discovered some good news: We laugh a lot online!
The study, conducted in response to this fun, anecdote-based New Yorker article, found that 15 percent of people included laughter in a post or comment that week. The most common laugh of all is haha (and variations like "haha, hahaha, haahhhaa, etc."), followed by various emoji and then hehe. Seriously, a whopping 51.4 percent of laughter-containing posts on Facebook used a ha-based laugh, while emojis accounted for 33.7 percent of Facebook laughter. Hehe (and hehehe, etc. variations) made up only 13.1 percent of the laughs according to the recent study.
But LOL-ers, you are a league of your own. Facebook's study shows that the old-school acronym was used in only 1.9 percent (!) of their sample data posts. Apparently, LOLs are more popular in southern states, whereas the midwest is all about those emojis. The west coast, according to the Facebook study, is all about the hehes and hahas.
Interestingly, the Facebook study found that, "Age, gender and geographic location play a role in laughter type and length: young people and women prefer emoji, whereas men prefer longer hehes. People in Chicago and New York prefer emoji, while Seattle and San Francisco prefer hahas." How's that for specific?
For more data-based analysis of our laughter online, check out Facebook's study for yourself! Make sure to like E! News' Facebook page, too—wink, wink!