Those changes look great! Excellent work!
Now you've told me about the emoji, I can see what you were doing. I always thought of that symbol as meaning "angry vein popping out of forehead", so it might work better on an area of head (if available). Or if you wanted to force the issue, you could give it a solid background colour so it doesn't blend in. Creating some emoji tiles to convey character emotions may not be an awful idea depending on the game, but those sprites are very small so you could lose a lot of detail. Also, it looks like you had to rotate it by 45 degrees, which changes the meaning for me, becoming "selected" or "targeted".
(TIL it's an official Unicode character!)