Abstract
Emojis have become more and more popular in text-based online communication to express emotions. This indicates a potential to utilize emojis in sentiment analysis and emotion measurements. However, many factors could affect people’s emoji usage and need to be examined. Among them, age, gender, and relationship types may result in different interpretations of the same emoji due to the ambiguity of the iconic expression. In this paper, we aim to explore how these factors may affect the frequency, type, and sentiment of people’s emoji usage in communications. After analyzing 6,821 Wechat chatting messages from 158 participants, we found people between 26–35 had lowest frequency of emoji usage; younger and elder groups showed different sentiment levels for the same emojis; people chose emoji types based on relationships. These findings shed light on how people use emojis as a communication tool.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Miller, H., et al.: “Blissfully happy” or “ready to fight”: varying interpretations of emoji. In: Proceedings of ICWSM (2016)
Novak, P.K., et al.: Sentiment of emojis. PLoS ONE 10(12), e0144296 (2015)
Garrison, A., et al.: Conventional faces: emoticons in instant messaging discourse. Comput. Compos. 28(2), 112–125 (2011)
Hautasaari, A.M., Yamashita, N., Gao, G.: Maybe it was a joke: emotion detection in text-only communication by non-native english speakers. In: Proceedings of the 32nd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM (2014)
Ogletree, S.M., Fancher, J., Gill, S.: Gender and texting: masculinity, femininity, and gender role ideology. Comput. Hum. Behav. 37, 49–55 (2014)
Chen, Z., et al.: Through a gender lens: an empirical study of emoji usage over large-scale android users. arXiv preprint arXiv:1705.05546 (2017)
Kelly, R., Watts, L.: Characterising the inventive appropriation of emoji as relationally meaningful in mediated close personal relationships. In: Experiences of Technology Appropriation: Unanticipated Users, Usage, Circumstances, and Design (2015)
Tigwell, G.W., Flatla, D.R.: Oh that’s what you meant!: reducing emoji misunderstanding. In: Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services Adjunct. ACM (2016)
Walther, J.B., D’Addario, K.P.: The impacts of emoticons on message interpretation in computer-mediated communication. Soc. Sci. Comput. Rev. 19(3), 324–347 (2001)
Yamamoto, Y., Kumamoto, T., Nadamoto, A.: Role of emoticons for multidimensional sentiment analysis of Twitter. In: Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Information Integration and Web-Based Applications & Services. ACM (2014)
Jaeger, S.R., et al.: Can emoji be used as a direct method to measure emotional associations to food names? Preliminary investigations with consumers in USA and China. Food Qual. Prefer. 56, 38–48 (2017)
Lu, X., et al.: Learning from the ubiquitous language: an empirical analysis of emoji usage of smartphone users. In: Proceedings of the 2016 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing. ACM (2016)
Barbieri, F., et al.: How cosmopolitan are emojis?: Exploring emojis usage and meaning over different languages with distributional semantics. In: Proceedings of the 2016 ACM on Multimedia Conference. ACM (2016)
Jaeger, S.R., Ares, G.: Dominant meanings of facial emoji: insights from Chinese consumers and comparison with meanings from internet resources. Food Qual. Prefer. 62, 275–283 (2017)
Miller, H.J., et al.: Understanding emoji ambiguity in context: the role of text in emoji-related miscommunication. In: ICWSM (2017)
Kaye, L.K., Malone, S.A., Wall, H.J.: Emojis: insights, affordances, and possibilities for psychological science. Trends Cogn. Sci. 21(2), 66–68 (2017)
Thoits, P.A.: Mechanisms linking social ties and support to physical and mental health. J. Health Soc. Behav. 52(2), 145–161 (2011)
Aroldi, P., et al.: Generational belonging between media audiences and ICT users. Broadband Soc. Gener. Changes 5, 51–67 (2011)
Ekman, P.: Emotions Revealed: Recognizing Faces and Feelings to Improve Communication and Emotional Life. Macmillan, Basingstoke (2007)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature
About this paper
Cite this paper
An, J., Li, T., Teng, Y., Zhang, P. (2018). Factors Influencing Emoji Usage in Smartphone Mediated Communications. In: Chowdhury, G., McLeod, J., Gillet, V., Willett, P. (eds) Transforming Digital Worlds. iConference 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10766. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78105-1_46
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78105-1_46
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-78104-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-78105-1
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)