Psychological analysis of emoticons used for e-mails on cellular phones

Emoticons which have supported by a cellular phone carrier were analyzed in terms of impressions from users, using the correspondence analysis and the semantic differential method. 31 emoticons were evaluated. In experiment 1, each emoticon was categorized into one of the six categories of happy, sad, fear, anger, surprise, and disgust. As an analysis result, emoticons of happy and sad are relatively many, and anger and disgust are realtively few. In experiment 2, impressions of emoticons are categorized using semantic differential method from 20 expressional word pairs. As an analysis result, emoticons are expressed with 3 factors of comfortable, active, and gentle. From these experiments, biases in numbers of emoticons in categories are observed so that suggestions are done to design a well-balanced emoticon set.