Research on Relationship between the Comprehension and Usage of Emoticons

Abstract

Emoticons have been the important information carries under the current network environment. This study is devoted to analyzing the relationship between the comprehension and the usage of emoticons. Firstly, from internet to recruit 460 participants, and using experiment to test their comprehension of emotions. Then, according their scores to group, selecting the top 27% of the participants with high comprehension scores become the high-comprehension group and the lower 27% of participants become the low-comprehension group. Afterwards, making questionnaires to investigated the emoticon behavior of the groups. The results show that the comprehension of emoticon affects the emoticon usage. People with high emoticon comprehension use emoticons more frequently, more categories and would like to updating their emoticons. In addition, they use emoticons on multiple devices and emoticons from various sources.