Use Of Emojis Research Articles

That’s Good News ☹

Abstract. The use of emojis in digital communication has become increasingly popular, but how emojis are processed and integrated in reading processes remains underexplored. This study used eye-tracking to monitor university students’ ( n = 47) eye movements while reading single-line text messages with a face emoji embedded medially. Messages contained a semantically congruent emoji (e.g., That’s good news 😊 tell me more), a semantically incongruent emoji (e.g., That’s good news ☹ tell me more), or a dash (e.g., That’s good news – tell me more). Results revealed that emoji congruency did not influence early fixation measures (first fixation duration and gaze duration), nor the probability of regressions. However, there was a significant congruency effect in total reading time and trial dwell time, showing that incongruence incurred a processing cost. The present results extend previously reported semantic congruency effects in sentence reading to the processing of emojis. This result suggests that the semantic content conveyed by face emojis is integrated with sentence context late in processing. We further found that the use of congruent emojis improved the relationship between sender and receiver: Ratings collected separately suggested that message senders were liked better if they included congruent than incongruent emojis. Overall, emojis attracted attention: Participants were twice as likely to fixate on emojis than on dashes, and to fixate on emojis for longer.

An Empirical Study on the Use of Emojis by College Students From the Perspective of Symbolic Interactionism

The present paper, by referring to the theory of Symbolic Interactionism, through the questionnaire survey among college students, studies the functions and influences of emoji use in online communication. It is found that emojis have linguistic, social and aesthetic functions. However, it also has certain disadvantages and limitations.

Emoji use in China: popularity patterns and changes due to COVID-19.

Emojis are small pictograms that are frequently embedded within micro-texts to more directly express emotional meanings. To understand the changes in the emoji usage of internet users during the COVID-19 outbreak, we analysed a large dataset collected from Weibo, the most popular Twitter-like social media platform in China, from December 1, 2019, to March 20, 2020. The data contained 38,183,194 microblog posts published by 2,239,472 unique users in Wuhan. We calculated the basic statistics of users’ usage of emojis, topics, and sentiments and analysed the temporal patterns of emoji occurrence. After examining the emoji co-occurrence structure, we finally explored other factors that may affect individual emoji usage. We found that the COVID-19 outbreak greatly changed the pattern of emoji usage; i.e., both the proportion of posts containing emojis and the ratio of users using emojis declined substantially, while the number of posts remained the same. The daily proportion of Happy emojis significantly declined to approximately 32%, but the proportions of Sad- and Encouraging-related emojis rose to 24% and 34%, respectively. Despite a significant decrease in the number of nodes and edges in the emoji co-occurrence network, the average degree of the network increased from 34 to 39.8, indicating that the diversity of emoji usage increased. Most interestingly, we found that male users were more inclined towards using regular textual language with fewer emojis after the pandemic, suggesting that during public crises, male groups appeared to control their emotional display. In summary, the COVID-19 pandemic remarkably impacted individual sentiments, and the normal pattern of emoji usage tends to change significantly following a public emergency.Supplementary InformationThe online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10489-022-03195-y.

With or without Emoji? Perceptions about Emoji Use in Different Brand-Consumer Communication Contexts

Brands are increasingly using emoji in their computer-mediated communication (CMC). However, research on how consumers perceive such use, and the determinants of those perceptions, is scarce and results may be inconsistent. In a cross-sectional study ( N = 540 ) we examined how appropriate participants considered to be the use of emoji by brands, across five brand-consumer communication contexts. We additionally examined whether these perceptions were determined by demographic and individual variables (e.g., gender and frequency of emoji use), as well as individual views about emoji use in written CMC. Overall, perceptions toward the use of emoji by brands depended on the context, with participants considering more appropriate for brands to use emoji when publicizing on social media and less appropriate when making callbacks of defective products. Results further showed that such perceptions were more favorable among younger participants and those who used emoji more frequently, but also among those who considered emoji use more useful and formal. These findings contribute to the CMC field by highlighting how perceptions of emoji use by brands are shaped, while also informing how brands can enhance CMC with consumers.

“Depends on Who I'm Writing To”—The Influence of Addressees and Personality Traits on the Use of Emoji and Emoticons, and Related Implications for Forensic Authorship Analysis

Converging towards or diverging from an interlocutor's speaking style (i.e., linguistic accommodation) has been investigated in many previous studies and is a highly relevant phenomenon in forensic authorship analysis. Accommodation has also been linked to personality traits, but there is still a lack of investigations of accommodation in computer-mediated communication. The present study thus aims at examining in how far emoji use is subject to accommodation in casual online interactions, and how reliable both emoji and emoticons are as markers of authorship. Further, this study is interested in finding out about connections between both emoji and emoticon use and the Big Five personality traits of agreeableness, emotional stability, conscientiousness, openness to experiences, and extraversion. The results of the analysis show that the frequency of emoji use is indeed strongly influenced by conversation partners, and that both emoji and emoticon use correlate particularly with extraversion and agreeableness. Despite the influence of conversation partners on emoji use, it can further be shown that emoji and emoticons remain valuable markers of authorship to different degrees.

Microblogging for Engagement: Effects of Prior Company Involvement, Communication Strategy, and Emojis on Western and Chinese Users

Companies’ social networking platforms can contribute to engaged stakeholder relationships, but many companies struggle to actually make that happen. An online experiment with IT companies’ microblogs investigated effects of communication strategy, emoji use, and prior company involvement on the appreciation and online engagement of Western and Chinese users. The exogenous variables had strong effects. Chinese users showed more appreciation and online engagement than Western users. Prior company involvement contributed to appreciation and online engagement. The message characteristics did not have the expected effects. Action- or community-focused microblogs resulted in lower appreciation. Emojis did not affect appreciation and online engagement.

Emoji as Icebreakers? Emoji can signal distinct intentions in first time online interactions

Very few studies have examined if emoji play a role in first-time interactions and whether their use conveys information about relationship initiation intentions. In two experimental studies (N = 758), we explored if using different emoji to initiate interactions with strangers on Facebook and Tinder were perceived to signal distinct intentions from the sender (Studies 1 and 2) and which emoji (if any) would be used to convey distinct intentions when sending a message to a stranger (Study 2). Results from Study 1 showed that participants perceived messages with ▪ (or without emoji) to signal friendship intentions, with ▪ (or ▪) to signal romantic intentions, and with ▪ (or ▪) to signal sexual intentions. Results were consistent across social platforms. Study 2 replicated the results regarding the impact of emoji use on perceived intentions. When asked to take the sender’s perspective, participants selected ▪ for friendship intentions, ▪ or ▪ for romantic intentions, and ▪ for sexual intentions. Still, about one-third of participants chose not to include emoji in initial interactions. Taken together, these findings suggest that emoji play an important role in online interpersonal communications and potentially shape the initiation of new relationships.

Investigating Different Age Groups’ Preferences and Purposes of Emoji Use

The research explores how much do people of different age use the emoji in digital communication. It also studies the purposes behind the use. The study compares three different age groups. It aims to find if there are any significant differences among groups. Different aspects of emoji use are researched worldwide but there is less evidence from age perspective. There is very little research done in Pakistani context. So, this study adds to knowledge in the field in Pakistani context. A representative sample is chosen from intermediate, undergraduate and postgraduate students through quota sampling from colleges and universities from Hyderabad, Sindh in 2017. The participants fill the questionnaire and data is analyzed quantitatively. The study explores if emoji are effective for all generations or a specific generation. The study helps understand different attitudes towards use of emoji.

Emojis predict dropouts of remote workers: An empirical study of emoji usage on GitHub.

Emotions at work have long been identified as critical signals of work motivations, status, and attitudes, and as predictors of various work-related outcomes. When more and more employees work remotely, these emotional signals of workers become harder to observe through daily, face-to-face communications. The use of online platforms to communicate and collaborate at work provides an alternative channel to monitor the emotions of workers. This paper studies how emojis, as non-verbal cues in online communications, can be used for such purposes and how the emotional signals in emoji usage can be used to predict future behavior of workers. In particular, we present how the developers on GitHub use emojis in their work-related activities. We show that developers have diverse patterns of emoji usage, which can be related to their working status including activity levels, types of work, types of communications, time management, and other behavioral patterns. Developers who use emojis in their posts are significantly less likely to dropout from the online work platform. Surprisingly, solely using emoji usage as features, standard machine learning models can predict future dropouts of developers at a satisfactory accuracy. Features related to the general use and the emotions of emojis appear to be important factors, while they do not rule out paths through other purposes of emoji use.

Evaluating the Adequacy of Emoji Use in Positive and Negative Messages from Close and Distant Senders.

Computer-mediated communication allows people to communicate across several contexts (e.g., friends, professional settings) by using video-based or text-based channels. In the latter case, communication lacks nonverbal cues (e.g., tone of voice) that are critical to message interpretation. Including emoji can help express emotion and reinforce or clarify the meaning of a message. However, the benefits of using emoji are likely to depend on the context (e.g., the relationship between interlocutors) and the messages' features (e.g., the valence of the message). To date, studies have not systematically and empirically examined how the use of emoji is perceived across different communication scenarios. In the current study, we asked 175 participants (49.5 percent women; Mage = 36.32, SD = 12.22) to imagine receiving either a negative or a positive message from 22 senders (e.g., friend; bank manager) and to indicate, for each case, how much they would like to receive an emoji and how useful and appropriate they considered the use of emoji. These ratings were combined into a single index of emoji use adequacy. Based on factor analysis, the 22 scenarios were aggregated in distant and close scenarios. Overall, results showed that participants considered emoji use more inadequate in distant (vs. close) scenarios and for negative (vs. positive) messages. These findings suggest that the perceived benefits of emoji use for text-based communication may not be generalized to all text-based communication contexts, such that relationship proximity and message valence should not be overlooked. Implications for the fields of consumer psychology and communication are discussed.

INTERNET PLATFORMS AS A FACTOR OF EMOTIONAL DISCOURSE OF VIGILANTS COMMUNITIES

This article identifies similarities and differences in emotional discourse in the communication of subscribers of vigilante Internet resources located on different technological platforms. As part of this study, API was used to upload comments over the past two years to materials posted in typical vigilante communities (Vkontakte API – «Lev Vs», «StopHam», «Piggy vs», «Anti-dealer»; Youtube API - the most popular videos «Lev Vs», «StopHam», «Piggy vs», «Sober Yard»). The sample size was 169,923 comments on Vkontakte and 175,096 comments on YouTube. The emoticon emoji served as the unit of analysis. Fixing the amount of emojis used was implemented with the assistance of a special Python script. Based on available data, a network analysis was carried out using the Gephi program (Fruchterman-Reingold layout). The authors concluded that it is not the goal direction of the vigilante group, but the communication tool that becomes the most important factor for the formation of a paralinguistic emotional discourse. Vigilante media, presented in the form of public and channels, act as mass media, and viewers and readers of their communities are the audience consuming this information. This argument is confirmed by the constant use of emojis that emphasize the «entertainment» of the presented content. Thus, most often, representatives of vigilante communities form not adherents who are ready to take part in their actions, but consumers.

Usando o modelo de Comunidade de Conhecimento para analisar emojis como linguagem emergente em experiências educacionais via WhatsApp

ABSTRACT With the ever-growing interest in WhatsApp as a social space to accommodate pedagogical initiatives, the role of emojis as an emergent Internet language in this social space needs to be better understood as mobile technologies have been integrated in education. With that in mind, this paper reports a study that employed an embedded correlational mixed methods design, and aimed to identify: the emojis used to support cognitive, teaching, and social presences in a teacher education course via WhatsApp; participants’ attitudes regarding the use of emojis, and their age and gender relation to this use. The data generated from the interactions of the teachers via WhatsApp were analyzed and discussed based on Garrison et al.’s (1999) Community of Inquiry Model. This conceptual framework identifies crucial elements for successful online educational experiences and assumes learning occurs through the interaction of three core elements: social, cognitive and teaching presences. The findings show that emojis can effectively be used to support teaching, cognitive, and social presences. The high frequency of emojis seem to be both culturally situated and gender related.

Constructing a data-based analytic rubric for an academic blog post

Recently, educational stakeholders have seen an accelerated move to online learning within which the ability to correspond effectively depends on good writing skills. Language learners are increasingly being asked to navigate new digital genres, such as academic blogs and discussion boards, without access to empirically-based descriptions of corresponding genre conventions. Furthermore, researchers have utilized multiple methods for assessing writing within this genre, ranging from full credit for completion to rubrics based on complexity, accuracy, and fluency. A genre-based approach to writing assessment would suggest identifying key features of academic blogs, and in turn, utilizing those descriptions to guide learners in improving their writing performance. For this project, six knowledgeable individuals reviewed the academic blog posts written by 148 English as a foreign language university students in response to a prompt on the pros and cons of using technology for language learning. The reviewers sorted the posts into six groups in order of merit, and they described each post with short phrases. This data informed the creation of a blog-specific analytic rubric containing five categories around which the reviewers assessed learners’ written performance: task fulfillment and relevancy, content, organization and balance, genre specific features (i.e., use of emojis and hyperlinks), and language use.

Visual Language of Communication: Comics, Memes, and Emojis

Emojis are rapidly becoming an integral part of our written language (or the ‘typed’ language) if they haven’t done so yet. Memes and GIFs are not far behind since their inclusion into the keypad of our smartphones. The present paper employs a linguistic approach to discuss the widespread use of memes and emojis in everyday text communication. In this paper, I have argued that despite many differences in application, comics, memes, and emojis all have a distinct similarity of being ‘visual’ in nature.I have shown with examples that instead of competing to replace each other, these verbal elements (words) and visual (images) elements complement the text together. The textual and pictorial elements of such textual-visual language make writing an even more efficient process of thought representation and a wholesome means for communication.

The impact of using emoji in online advertisements on consumer behavior. Case: Banking sector in Lebanon

Abstract Communication is an essential element in life. It is key to understanding each other, forming relationships, and sharing knowledge, information and ideas. “Social media is modifying the ways we communicate and is providing marketers with interactive means to effectively reach consumers. This has given rise to those digital images known as Emoji, which is a trending topic that is shaping our lives and sculpting its way to related social sciences. Many businesses have been employing emoji in their communication messages, yet little research was conducted in this area. This research will build new insights and will investigate the role of emoji in influencing behaviors in terms of engagement, satisfaction, loyalty, and perception. Abductive approach to theory was used. Secondary data was collected to explore and explain the concept of online marketing psychology using emoji language. The idea is then tested via survey, to modify the existing theory, and to generate a new idea regarding banks via interview as well. Research questions investigated the use of emoji in online communication as an effective way to engage consumers, whether emoji lead to better customer satisfaction and loyalty, and how serious organizations can benefit from employing them to break the perceived “coldness”. Results approved the effectiveness of emoji use in marketing, and they’re no longer limited to “modern” businesses, rather they’re starting to encompass almost all businesses in different industries. The research ends with a set of recommendations that’ll guide businesses through this trend.”

Digitally saving face: An experimental investigation of cross-cultural differences in the use of emoticons and emoji

Across three experiments we examined cross-cultural differences in the use of emoticons (Experiment 1) and emoji (Experiments 2 and 3) when sending text messages. In all experiments, participants wrote text messages to another person based on different hypothetical situations (varying in valence or face-threat). We assume that digital CMC cues can serve a face-management function. Hence, based on the assumption that East Asians, relative to Americans, tend to be more concerned with face-management, we expected East Asians to use more emoji and emoticons than Americans, especially in threatening situations. Our results supported our hypotheses: East Asians used significantly more CMC cues overall, and displayed greater situational sensitivity (i.e., used more situationally-congruent CMC cues). Moreover, there were significant, positive correlations between emoji use and scores on collectivism and interdependent self-construal. The preference for emoji use by East Asians does not appear to be a function of poorer English language proficiency; in Experiment 3 there was a significant positive correlation between ESL proficiency and emoji use. We discuss these findings in the context of past cross-cultural communication research as well as politeness theory and face-negotiation theory.

The impact of emoji use and feedback medium on perceptions of marker personality in online assessment feedback

This study investigated whether emoji and multimedia delivery in online assessment feedback influenced student perceptions of the marker. Undergraduate students (N = 296) read a faux essay and viewed associated feedback emulating the comments students might receive in higher education. Feedback was manipulated using a 2 (emoji: no, yes) × 3 (medium: written-only, written plus audio, and written plus audio-visual) between-groups design. There were no main effects for the emoji manipulation. However, audio-visual feedback produced higher perceptions of marker intelligence and honesty-humility. In addition, the effect of emoji depended upon medium such that in feedback without emoji, perceptions of marker emotional stability and conscientiousness were lowest for audio feedback and highest for audio-visual feedback. Overall, results revealed that feedback medium and paralinguistic emotional cues interact to influence perceptions of the marker. Educators should consider how this interconnection may affect student engagement with the feedback process when delivering assessment feedback online.

An Emoji Is Worth a Thousand Words

Face emojis are regularly used in reviews on online shopping sites to add richness and/or levity to the text. However, few researchers have investigated the use of face emojis in consumer reviews. This paper examined the effects of the number of face emojis (none, one and three) in user-generated reviews (UGRs) on trustworthiness and purchase intention. We found that the number of face emojis in UGRs has a profound impact on consumers. A greater number of face emojis correlates with a greater degree of review trustworthiness. However, the effect of emojis on purchase intention changes depending on the situation. Additionally, when there is a profile picture, consumers pay more attention to it, and the positive effect due to face emojis disappears. Moreover, the gift giver-recipient relationship moderates the effect of face emojis on user decisions. The findings of our work have theoretical and managerial implications with respect to providing a new means of understanding consumer perceptions of products, from which business can benefit by improving sales and policies.

Emotional Nuances: Critical Reflections on Emoji Methods

The present article critically reflects on the use of visual method and specifically emojis when interviewing young students diagnosed with autism. Based on disability studies and visual method, the following questions are discussed: What are the opportunities and limitations of using emojis in the individual interview situation? Which questions are possible to ask – and which are not? The aim of the article is to critically discuss the use of emojis in the individual interview situation. Four challenging phases in which use of emojis is multi-dimensional are illustrated. The phases are: Changed positions in the interview situation. Which questions are possible to ask? Which answers are possible to give? Use of emojis to evaluate the experience of being interviewed. The article highlights how emojis enable the expression of emotional nuances, while also giving rise to some difficulties in asking follow-up questions on a “deeper level”.

An Emoji Is Worth a Thousand Words

Face emojis are regularly used in reviews on online shopping sites to add richness and/or levity to the text. However, few researchers have investigated the use of face emojis in consumer reviews. This paper examined the effects of the number of face emojis (none, one, and three) in user-generated reviews (UGRs) on trustworthiness and purchase intention. They found that the number of face emojis in UGRs has a profound impact on consumers. A greater number of face emojis correlates with a greater degree of review trustworthiness. However, the effect of emojis on purchase intention changes depending on the situation. Additionally, when there is a profile picture, consumers pay more attention to it, and the positive effect due to face emojis disappears. Moreover, the gift giver-recipient relationship moderates the effect of face emojis on user decisions. The findings of our work have theoretical and managerial implications with respect to providing a new means of understanding consumer perceptions of products, from which business can benefit by improving sales and policies.