Emojis on Different Communication Platforms Across Different Cultures

ROLE: RESEARCHER

01/21 - 05/21

Academic project completed at Cornell University with Macy Hung, Tim Lu, Ben Pichel, Stephanie Tom, Nina Xie, Xuanpu Zhang

Instructor: Professor Susan Fussell

ABSTRACT

Many people around the world use emojis to express themselves and add connotation to their text messages. Since emojis are used worldwide, there is potential for the development of different cultural norms and interpretations within different countries. Our group has set out to compare how East Asian international students at Cornell use and interpret emojis in contrast to North American students. By taking a look at cultural, geographical, and demographic factors, our study focuses on comparing the differences between the two by concentrating on emoji usage from messaging platforms that are specific to both countries.

REFERENCE

Barbieri, F., Kruszewski, G., Ronzano, F., & Saggion, H. (2016). How Cosmopolitan Are Emojis? Proceedings of the 24th ACM International Conference on Multimedia. doi:10.1145/2964284.2967278

Gao, B., & Vanderlaan, D. P. (2020). Cultural Influences on Perceptions of Emotions Depicted in Emojis. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, 23(8), 567-570. doi:10.1089/cyber.2020.0024

Park, J., Vladimir B., Fink, C., and Cha, M. (2013). “Emoticon Style: Interpreting Differences in Emoticons Across Cultures.” In International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM 2013).

St. Amant, K. (2016). Introduction to the special issue: Cultural considerations for communication design. Communication Design Quarterly, 4(1), 6–22. https://doi.org/10.1145/2875501.2875502