Spice up Your Chat: The Intentions and Sentiment Effects of Using Emoji

Emojis, as a new way of conveying nonverbal cues, are widely adopted in computer-mediated communications. In this paper, first from a message sender perspective, we focus on people's motives in using four types of emojis -- positive, neutral, negative, and non-facial. We compare the willingness levels of using these emoji types for seven typical intentions that people usually apply nonverbal cues for in communication. The results of extensive statistical hypothesis tests not only report the popularities of the intentions, but also uncover the subtle differences between emoji types in terms of intended uses. Second, from a perspective of message recipients, we further study the sentiment effects of emojis, as well as their duplications, on verbal messages. Different from previous studies in emoji sentiment, we study the sentiments of emojis and their contexts as a whole. The experiment results indicate that the powers of conveying sentiment are different between four emoji types, and the sentiment effects of emojis vary in the contexts of different valences.Comment: 10 pages, published at ICWSM'1

Undergraduates' interpretation on WhatsApp smiley emoji

Undergraduate students, who are digital native, are keen on using emoji (smileys and ideograms) frequently to express themselves emotionally in their digital communication such as WhatsApp Messenger. Nevertheless, sometimes, they got into misunderstanding due to the different emoji's interpretation between the sender and the recipient. Research investigating emoji is still relatively new and this study discusses the diverse interpretations of WhatsApp emoji specifically the smileys among Malaysian undergraduates in a public university. This study attempted to investigate 210 undergraduates' interpretations of 75 smiley (face-like) meanings in WhatsApp Messenger. The respondents were asked to give feedback in self-administrated survey questionnaire to gather information on their interpretation of the smileys used in WhatsApp. A descriptive analysis was conducted on the students' interpretations and the findings disclosed that although the students interpreted a few smileys correctly, they did not know the intended meaning of most of the smileys correctly. The results of this study suggested that the students should know the meaning of the smiley/ emoji used in their digital conversation to able to understand its intended use and to avoid miscommunication in their digital communication. For WhatsApp users, the findings will be beneficial to emphasize the need to understand the emoji's intended meaning for future tolerant and wiser use

The Relationship between the Use of Emoticons and Virtual Engagement on Facebook among the Expatriates in the UAE

This study explores the practice of utilizing emoticons on Facebook and the different levels of virtual engagement according to gender among the expatriates in United Arab Emirates. The primary responses from 236 expatriates were collected using survey questionnaire. The data collected included demographic variables that constitute gender, age and nationality, frequency, social engagement level and motives of use of emoticons. The variables were analyzed using frequencies, correlations and t- tests. The results of the analysis show that both males and females used emoticons on Facebook; however, emoticons were used more frequently in personal communication than on official chats. It was further found that the main motives for the utilization of emoticons were to express emotions and to enhance the meaning of chat

Exploring Text Messages by Using Emojis on Indonesian Whatsapp

WhatsApp is a free messaging and calling application that can be downloaded to mobile phones all over the world that supports the feature. It is straightforward, trustworthy, and secure. WhatsApp enables us to exchange text, voice, and audio-visual (video) messages. However, text message recipients often fail to understand the intended meaning of a text message because the text messages are not provided with intonation and direct expression, resulting in the recipient’s difficulty interpreting the message's intended meaning. This study aimed to find out the functions of emojis in WhatsApp text messages. Interpretative qualitative was used as the research methodology in this study. The data source used is the results of screenshots of chat activities on the WhatsApp application. The study came up with the findings that the primary function of emojis in WhatsApp text messages is to show and emphasize emotion, expression, and feeling like happiness, sadness, apology, embarrassment, support, anger, mockery, gratitude, criticism, humorous, etc. that cannot be spoken verbally or conveyed/shown directly

The Relationship between the Use of Emoticons and Virtual Engagement on Facebook among the Expatriates in the UAE

This study explores the practice of utilizing emoticons on Facebook and the different levels of virtual engagement according to gender among the expatriates in United Arab Emirates. The primary responses from 236 expatriates were collected using survey questionnaire. The data collected included demographic variables that constitute gender, age and nationality, frequency, social engagement level and motives of use of emoticons. The variables were analyzed using frequencies, correlations and t- tests. The results of the analysis show that both males and females used emoticons on Facebook; however, emoticons were used more frequently in personal communication than on official chats. It was further found that the main motives for the utilization of emoticons were to express emotions and to enhance the meaning of chat

Emojis and the Law

Emojis are an increasingly important way we express ourselves. Though emojis may be cute and fun, their usage can lead to misunderstandings with significant legal stakes—such as whether someone should be obligated by contract, liable for sexual harassment, or sent to jail. Our legal system has substantial experience interpreting new forms of content, so it should be equipped to handle emojis. Nevertheless, some special attributes of emojis create extra interpretative challenges. This Article identifies those attributes and proposes how courts should handle them. One particularly troublesome interpretative challenge arises from the different ways platforms depict emojis that are nominally standardized through the Unicode Consortium. These differences can unexpectedly create misunderstandings. The diversity of emoji depictions is not technologically required, nor does it necessarily benefit users. Instead, it likely reflects platforms’ concerns about intellectual property protection for emojis, which forces them to introduce unnecessary variations that create avoidable confusion. Thus, intellectual property may be hindering our ability to communicate with each other. This Article will discuss how to limit this unwanted consequence

Paralinguistic and Rhetorical Capabilities of Emojis in Marketing Communication

Consumers and social media marketers have over 3,000 emojis at their fingertips. Despite the popularity of emojis on social media, marketing research on emojis remains limited. Extant marketing research on emojis that does exist primarily focuses on the emotional and reinforcement capabilities, a remnant of the limitations of the emoticon ancestor, and largely ignores the additional paralinguistic and rhetorical potential of emojis. In this dissertation, emojis as a paralanguage are explored with a particular focus on the creation of meaning on social media (Essay 1), and emojis as a full (Essay 2) and partial (Essay 3) substitute for text in marketing communication. Essay 1 is a conceptual piece that examines the perpetual evolution of emoji meaning on social media through the lens of symbolic interactionism and liquid consumption. Essay 2 looks at how consumers evaluate strings of emojis and shows that emoji only communication has a negative (positive) effect on brand attitude via processing fluency (fun) when compared to the equivalent textual translation. Essay 3 focuses on emojis as partial substitutes for promotions on social media (e.g., “buy one get one” becomes “buy ☝ get ☝). This essay demonstrates the positive effect of gesture emojis on promotion evaluation via heightened processing fluency, when compared to object emojis. However, when the message includes haptic imagery, processing fluency and promotion evaluation are similar for gesture and object emojis. Overall, this dissertation explores the paralinguistic and rhetorical potential of emojis in marketing communication and provides insights to marketers that use emojis on social media