Mining the Relationship between Emoji Usage Patterns and Personality

Abstract

Emojis have been widely used in textual communications as a new way to convey nonverbal cues. An interesting observation is the various emoji usage patterns among different users. In this paper, we investigate the correlation between user personality traits and their emoji usage patterns, particularly on overall amounts and specific preferences. To achieve this goal, we build a large Twitter dataset which includes 352,245 users and over 1.13 billion tweets associated with calculated personality traits and emoji usage patterns. Our correlation and emoji prediction results provide insights into the power of diverse personalities that lead to varies emoji usage patterns as well as its potential in emoji recommendation tasks.

Interactions between text content and emoji types determine perceptions of both messages and senders

“…Van Dam et al (2019) found that emoji associated with emotional affect, while suggesting that analysing emoji use patterns could be advantageous for clinical purposes. The development and implementation of psychological measurement tools incorporating emoji may be effective in determining mental health outcomes, as emoji usage is associated with 'Big Five' (e.g., Costa & McCrae, 1992) personality traits, distress, and self-monitoring (Derks et al, 2008a;Hall & Pennington, 2013;Li, Chen, Hu, & Luo, 2018). Moreover, it was found by Phan et al ( 2019) that emoji anchors within interest scales illustrated the same psychometric properties as lexical anchors, and that in some contexts, emoji anchors might predict certain outcomes better than lexical scales (Phan et al, 2019).…”

Emoji use in social media posts: relationships with personality traits and word usage

“…The present research is among the first to examine how emoji use on X (formerly Twitter) is related to users’ self-reported Big Five personality traits and their language use in posts. We tested the hypothesis that individuals higher in agreeableness and mood instability and lower in extraversion may use emojis more frequently than others (c.f., Li et al, 2018 ). We also tested the hypothesis that emoji use would be related to word usage frequencies as assessed with LIWC ( Pennebaker et al, 2015 ; See also Kacewicz et al, 2014 ), with categories related to emotion being related to emojis, particularly those most directly related to emotion (e.g., tone, positive emotion, negative emotion, affect, as well as others).…”

“…Few studies have examined the extent to which use of emoticons or emojis in social media posts relate to individual differences in personal characteristics ( Hall and Pennington, 2013 ; Pohl et al, 2017 ; Li et al, 2018 ; López-Rúa, 2021 ; Aljasir, 2023 ). In a study of Facebook posts, Hall and Pennington (2013) assessed self-monitoring and Big Five personality traits and explored how they related to characteristics of posts.…”

“…Most recently, Li et al (2018) examined how emoji use in posts was related to personality traits in a sample of posts. Using a machine learning model, they estimated users’ Big Five personality traits from frequencies of words used in the posts using the Linguistic Inquiry Word Count (LIWC; Pennebaker et al, 2015 ), which calculates frequencies for word categories (e.g., pronouns and other function words, words related to social relationships, emotion, biological concepts, etc.)…”

“…Those with higher levels of openness used words over six letters more often than those with lower levels of openness. Li et al (2018) used a machine learning algorithm trained with the LIWC word categories to estimate personality traits and showed that overall, emojis were used more frequently by users categorized as low in extraversion, high in agreeableness, and high in neuroticism. They also found that users categorized as high in agreeableness were more likely to use heart-shaped emojis and less likely to use negative emojis than other users.…”