Estimating Emotions from Emojis and Their Use in Computer-Mediated Communication

In connection with the development of mobile devices and more frequent computer-mediated communication, most often in the form of text messages, there is a need to simply communicate the emotions associated with the communicated messages. Therefore, text messages are enriched with more information, most often in the form of emoticons, emojis or stickers. Research on emojis has been gaining popularity in the last five years. Four emojis expressing different emotions were chosen for the quantitative research presented here: joy, anger, fear, and surprise. The aim of this paper is to compare the ability to estimate emotions in a sentence and assign the correct emoji to an emotionally colored sentence in representatives of generations Y and Z in the Czech and Slovak Republics (N = 863). According to data from the conducted questionnaire, both generations are similarly successful in interpreting and using emojis in a number of situations. Yet it can be said that representatives of Generation Y were significantly more successful in recognizing joy in an emotionally colored sentence. On the other hand, representatives of Generation Z were better at connecting the correct emoji with an emotionally colored text message. There can also be found differences in the use of emojis based on gender. Women use the emoji `joy' more often than men. In an aggregated view of the success of men and women, it can be concluded that men were better able to recognize anger in an emotionally colored sentence and use this emoji correctly. On the other hand, women were better in other cases (joy, fear, and surprise). The results also indicate that the use of some types of emojis is more multifarious because emojis can be used as an additional emotional charge (information) which may not be exactly in line with the accompanying text message.