Origins of the Rubbing Hands emoji The rubbing hands emoji first appeared among other emoji images on Shutterstock in 2018. It was described as a “Scheming villain emoticon rubbing his hands.” ...

In the second experiment, which involved 178 participants, these emoji were replaced with GIFs - either a negative non-face GIF, a positive non-face GIF, a negative face GIF, or a positive face GIF.