How do I communicate my emotions on SNS and IMs?

With influx of new devices and applications over the past few years, computer mediated communication has developed as an alternate to face-to-face communication. Through our study we attempt to understand how individuals communicate in mediated settings in emotion-laden situations. We explore their preferred medium of communication in different situations along with analysis of the content of communication. Spatial arrays, lexical surrogates, vocal spellings and grammatical markers were used as strategies by individuals for communicating non-verbal cues in text based communication. We also look at how messages sent on IMs or posts on social networks are interpreted by readers in terms of the emotional state of the sender. We found that while valence of the sender gets easily and accurately communicated, arousal is misinterpreted in most situations. In this paper, we present findings from our study which can be valuable for technology companies looking to better the current communication experience across different media.