Understanding Emoji Interpretation through User Personality and Message Context

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Research Design & Material

To examine the relationship between emoji interpretation and personality, we conducted an online survey. The questionnaire comprised three parts:

(1) One part presented participants with mock-up chat conversations and a set of emojis. People then actively had to select emojis which they would have sent along with the given message.

(2) In another part, participants were asked to qualitatively describe differences between two emojis within a chat conversation.

(3) Finally, the third part included demographic information and the German version of the Big Five Inventory questionnaire by Danner et al.

A pdf copy of the questionnaire we used may be found here. Please note that the questionnaire is provided in German, the original language used. If you require a translation, please contact the first author.

Research Design & Material

To examine the relationship between emoji interpretation and personality, we conducted an online survey. The questionnaire comprised three parts:

(1) One part presented participants with mock-up chat conversations and a set of emojis. People then actively had to select emojis which they would have sent along with the given message.

(2) In another part, participants were asked to qualitatively describe differences between two emojis within a chat conversation.

(3) Finally, the third part included demographic information and the German version of the Big Five Inventory questionnaire by Danner et al.

A pdf copy of the questionnaire we used may be found here. Please note that the questionnaire is provided in German, the original language used. If you require a translation, please contact the first author.

Active Interpretation Task

In the Active Interpretation question type, our survey presented participants with mock-up chat conversations. We asked participants to imagine sending the given text message and to select those emojis which they would add at the position of the placeholder. Moreover, participants were explicitly made aware that they are allowed to concatenate several emojis or to choose no emoji at all. Please find more information in our paper on the selection of scenarios.

Scenarios

Scenario	Positive	Negative
Information
Arranging
Salutory
Romantic

Emojis

Since there were more than 1,600 emojis when our survey was conducted in November 2018, we had to select a subset for the survey. We included all facial expression emojis and the most popular emojis on different social media websites. We used the WhatsApp on Android rendering.

Passive Interprtation Task

In this part of the survey, participants were presented with new chat conversations. In particular, for each situation, two identical conversations were shown, which only differed in the emoji at the end of the message. Participants were asked to compare and describe differences in the two chat conversations in an open question. In general, we selected emojis, which emphasise the emotional tone of the message and we chose pairs of emojis which were found to be semantically similar. This was motivated by gaining insight into: how an emoji in a message is interpreted between different participants and 2) how the interpretation of a message differs depending on the shown emojis.

Scenarios

Scenario	Scenario 1	Scenario 2
Information
Arranging
Salutory
Romantic