Cover face wechat emoji
From a linguistic point of view, some researchers regard emojis as representations of morphemes and words ( Kavanagh, 2016). Research evidence suggests that emojis and their related products share many similarities with early pictorial or symbolic languages that convey information through imagery ( Dresner and Herring, 2014 Kern, 2015 Alshenqeeti, 2016). They can be combined with short texts to represent more complex ideas, such as environmental descriptions, body language, and textual illustrations (see Figure 1 for examples of emojis and stickers available on the instant messaging platform WeChat) ( Lee et al., 2016).Įxamples of emojis and stickers that are available in WeChat. In comparison to emojis, stickers are animated or static images that are usually bigger and therefore must be sent separately from the written texts ( Zhou et al., 2017). Recently, a new type of emoji called a sticker is also widely adopted in the instant messaging world ( Chen and Siu, 2017 Zhou et al., 2017). They originated from emoticons, which were facial expressions formed by punctuation marks ( Cramer et al., 2016 Lu et al., 2016 Tang and Hew, 2019). Emojis are small symbols available on standardized keyboards that can be inserted within written texts to represent a wide range of faces, objects, and ideas. This has led to the birth of a new form of “language” named emojis ( Krohn, 2004 Marengo et al., 2017). While people adopt a variety of emotional cues, such as facial expressions and voice tones, when conversing face to face, they also find the need to do so in CMC ( Derks et al., 2008). 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). Human communication is always evolving ( Crystal, 2006).
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. Some differences in usage patterns were also observed between emojis and stickers. People who showed such tendencies were found to differ in personality with those who did not. 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. Results revealed that shyness, neuroticism, extraversion, and agreeableness were correlated with different reasons of usage. Participants ( n = 312) completed three online questionnaires assessing shyness, the Big Five personality traits, and why and how they used emojis and stickers.
The present study examined the associations between personality traits and people’s reasons and patterns for using both emojis and stickers. Emojis and stickers are becoming increasingly popular in computer-mediated communications.