Abstract
With the increasing popularity of social apps, sending emojis has become a very common way of expressing one’s emotions. However, situations often arise when people send the wrong emoji by mistake, or sometimes even an emoji with an opposite meaning, which can cause embarrassment to the sender. Taking WeChat as an example, which is widely used in Chinese communities, this study summarizes 10 types of dialogue situations in which the meaning of an emoji is wrongly sent and 12 types of emotional components that are related to embarrassment. The purpose of this study was to analyze the extent to which the 12 emotional components that are associated with embarrassment actually explain what embarrassment is, as well as the different degrees of embarrassment among the different genders and age groups. The results showed that (1) among the emotional components of embarrassment, shame has the highest explanation degree for embarrassment; (2) males are more likely to be affected by embarrassment than females; and (3) users aged 18–25 and 26–30 years are more likely to be affected by embarrassment than those aged between 31 and 40 when they mistakenly send WeChat emojis. This study provides a reference value for their sustainable psychological impact on social app users.
Highlights
Amidst the fierce competition of mobile real-time social software, it is becoming more important to maintain the users’ willingness to continue using the software (Zhang et al, 2017)
Through experiments and analysis, it was found that (1) the average value of embarrassment and its emotional components for males is significantly higher than that for females; (2) compared to users between 31 and 40 years old, users aged between 18 and 5 years are more susceptible to embarrassment when they mistakenly send WeChat emojis, while users aged between 26 and 30 years are susceptible to embarrassment; and (3) the degree of shame caused by embarrassment is the highest
Because embarrassment has adverse consequences, eliminating it in WeChat communication can enhance the interaction between users and make them willing to continue to use the social platform
Summary
Amidst the fierce competition of mobile real-time social software, it is becoming more important to maintain the users’ willingness to continue using the software (Zhang et al, 2017). Mobile Instant Messengers (MIMs), such as Messenger, WhatsApp, LINE, and WeChat, are very popular, and sending emojis has become a very common way of expressing one’s emotions (Annamalai & Salam, 2017). Researchers have found that while emojis are very popular, the wrong ones or even those with an opposite meaning are sometimes mistakenly sent by users, when one is not expecting to do so; it may cause embarrassing emotions. Contact and communication with others are important activities in the lives of people, and information transmission can be facilitated by means of WhatsApp, WeChat, LINE, and Telegram. Most past studies have only focused on Facebook, YouTube, or other international MIMs that are most popular in Western countries (Montag et al, 2018; Tsai & Men, 2018).
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