An Empirical Study on the Communication and Usage Psychology of Emoji in Wechat

Abstract

As an indispensable active atmosphere and meaningful emotional expression in social media, emojis describe the emotions of users in specific situations in a funny, humorous, euphemistic, and implicit form and attract users to use them consciously or unconsciously with their quick and convenient features. Currently, the research on the psychology of emoji usage is mostly from the perspective of users, while neglecting the essential attributes of emojis. The purpose of this study was to investigate and summarize the multi-dimensional factors that affect the communication and usage of emojis and to elucidate the influence of the essential attributes of emojis on their use. This study took the users of WeChat (the most widely used instant messaging app in China) as the research object. Data were collected utilizing semi-structured interviews and questionnaires. SPSS 25.0 software was applied to conduct exploratory factor analysis on relevant data to explore and summarize several dimensions of WeChat users’ emoji communication and usage psychology. The results showed that gender, age, education, and occupation were important factors affecting the usage and communication of emojis. The psychology of emoji usage had multi-dimensional characteristics and according to the self-determination theory, it could be divided into internal and external factors. The internal factors included information, efficiency, and entertainment, and the external factors included communicativeness, culture, image, fuzziness, and context. Notably, the influence of fuzziness on the psychology of emoji usage has described the critical role of the essential attributes of emojis, which complemented the neglect of the fuzziness of emoji in previous studies, which might provide a direction for the design of emojis.