Cross-Cultural Comparison of Nonverbal Cues in Emoticons on Twitter: Evidence from Big Data Analysis

Abstract

Relying on Gudykunst's cultural variability in communication (CVC) framework and culture‐specific facial expressions of emotion, we examined how people's use of emoticons varies cross‐culturally. By merging emoticon usage patterns on Twitter with Hofstede's national culture scores and national indicators across 78 countries, this study found that people within individualistic cultures favor horizontal and mouth‐oriented emoticons like :), while those within collectivistic cultures favor vertical and eye‐oriented emoticons like ^_^. Our study serves to demonstrate how recent big data‐driven approaches can be used to test research hypotheses in cross‐cultural communication effectively from the methodological triangulation perspective. Implications and limitations regarding the findings of this study are also discussed.

Consequences of customer engagement behavior: when negative Facebook posts have positive effects

“…Second, we only manipulated the valence and the sender of the Facebook posts. Yet, as previous research shows (e.g., Ganster et al 2012;Lo 2008;Park et al 2014), non-verbal cues are commonly used for online communication, which we did not include in either the positively or in the negatively valenced comments. Thus, future research should analyze, whether those cues trigger different reactions or intensify the observed effects.…”

Predicting Code-switching in Multilingual Communication for Immigrant Communities

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e-Language: Communication in the Digital Age

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