Perception And Expression Of Emotion In IM: The Effect Of Emoticons

As the popularity of Internet, communication media have obtained continuous development, especially IM (instant message), which has held the top place of internet utilization for successive years. As a special feature of IM, emoticons have been accepted widely. Based on social information processing theory, a series of studies indicated that emoticons set nonverbal communication and emotional expression in one, they can effectively compensate for the lack of nonverbal cues in internet communication, which plays a crucial role in understanding the content of messages accurately. Emoticons also reproduce various facial expressions visually to convey emotions and feelings, which can facilitate internet relationship formation, maintenance and development. However, researchers have not paid sufficient attentions to the emotional components hiding in emoticons, which makes it difficult to explain the characteristics of emoticons usage in the process of emotional communication, while the latter is of great significance to understand deeply the features of emotional communication in virtual environment. To achieve this goal, this study was composed of following two specific researches.Research1:Questionnaires were administrated to explore the basic situation of college students’ usage behavior of QQ emoticons, including the commonly used types of emoticons and their emotional content. Meanwhile, the gender differences in characteristics of overall usage of emoticons were analyzed. The results show that: people tend to use emoticons to express their own emotions, or perceive emotions of others, and there is no significant gender differences in the overall frequency of usage. Through analyzing the usage of66QQ classic emoticons, we found that8emoticons have been used more frequently than others, while13emoticons have received a significant gender difference. Combining with the11categories of emotions, results suggest that the above8emoticons mainly been used to express happiness, embarrassment and sadness; females tend to use more emoticons for negative emotions than males, while, the latter refers more to positive emotions.Research2:Based on research1, with a reference to the paradigm of Walther and O’Addario (2001), a scenario experiment was employed to investigate the effect of emotional expression styles consisting of emoticons or emotional words on perception of emotional intensity, the specific expression styles which have been preferred to communicate emotions and the probable gender difference in emotional perception and characteristics of emoticons usage have also been explored. Results showed that:(1) the main effects of expression styles, emotions and gender on perception were significant;(2) there was a interaction effect between expression styles and emotions;(3) the preferences to expression styles have been affected by emotions;(4) gender has an obvious influence on the preferences to different emotional expression styles.Finally, both of the limitations of the present study and future directions were discussed.