Abstract
Emojis and stickers are becoming increasingly popular in computer-mediated communications. The present study examined the associations between personality traits and people’s reasons and patterns for using both emojis and stickers. Participants (n = 312) completed three online questionnaires assessing shyness, the Big Five personality traits, and why and how they used emojis and stickers. Results revealed that shyness, neuroticism, extraversion, and agreeableness were correlated with different reasons of usage. Moreover, some participants exhibited a tendency to adjust frequency of usage depending on who the target person was and whether they were in a private or group chat. People who showed such tendencies were found to differ in personality with those who did not. Some differences in usage patterns were also observed between emojis and stickers. Together, the present study has produced more insight into how emojis and stickers can help people with different personality traits to achieve different purposes in their daily communication.
Highlights
Human communication is always evolving (Crystal, 2006)
The present study was designed to investigate whether personality traits were related to the reasons and patterns that people use emojis and stickers
Past research identified a number of reasons for the combined use of emojis and stickers (Tang and Hew, 2019)
Summary
Human communication is always evolving (Crystal, 2006). With the advent of social media and instant messaging services (e.g., Apple iMessage, WhatsApp, and WeChat), computer-mediated communication (CMC) has become an indispensable part in many people’s daily lives (Alshenqeeti, 2016; Riordan, 2017; Prada et al, 2018). While people adopt a variety of emotional cues, such as facial expressions and voice tones, when conversing face to face, they find the need to do so in CMC (Derks et al, 2008) This has led to the birth of a new form of “language” named emojis (Krohn, 2004; Marengo et al, 2017). Stickers are animated or static images that are usually bigger and must be sent separately from the written texts (Zhou et al, 2017) They can be combined with short texts to represent more complex ideas, such as environmental descriptions, body language, Personality and Emoji Sticker Usage and textual illustrations (see Figure 1 for examples of emojis and stickers available on the instant messaging platform WeChat) (Lee et al, 2016)
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