Undergraduates' Interpretation on WhatsApp Smiley Emoji

Abstract

Undergraduate students, who are digital native, are keen on using emoji (smileys and ideograms) frequently to express themselves emotionally in their digital communication such as WhatsApp Messenger. Nevertheless, sometimes, they got into misunderstanding due to the different emoji's interpretation between the sender and the recipient. Research investigating emoji is still relatively new and this study discusses the diverse interpretations of WhatsApp emoji specifically the smileys among Malaysian undergraduates in a public university. This study attempted to investigate 210 undergraduates' interpretations of 75 smiley (face-like) meanings in WhatsApp Messenger. The respondents were asked to give feedback in self-administrated survey questionnaire to gather information on their interpretation of the smileys used in WhatsApp. A descriptive analysis was conducted on the students' interpretations and the findings disclosed that although the students interpreted a few smileys correctly, they did not know the intended meaning of most of the smileys correctly. The results of this study suggested that the students should know the meaning of the smiley/ emoji used in their digital conversation to able to understand its intended use and to avoid miscommunication in their digital communication. For WhatsApp users, the findings will be beneficial to emphasize the need to understand the emoji's intended meaning for future tolerant and wiser use.

Pictographs, Ideograms, and Emojis (PIE): A Framework for Empirical Research Using Non-verbal Cues

“…Semiotics is broadly divided into three areas [19]. The first area is semantics-related to the meaning of the sign or what it represents in a particular context [20,21]. The second area is syntactics.…”

Early and Late Fusion of Emojis and Text to Enhance Opinion Mining

“…In the context of emojis, several factors can lead to ambiguity in interpreting its meaning, e.g. diversity of users [40]- [42], genders [43]- [46], locations [47], [48], and cultures [49]. Emojis also appear differently on different platforms [40], [50], [51].…”

“…This issue is dealt with as an imbalanced class problem and was addressed through generating synthetic instances for the minority class using a bagging ensemble in [33]. Additionally, young people tend to use emojis more frequently [42], [54]. Emojis are analyzed and studied in different social media platforms including: Twitter such as [19], [20], [25], [33], [55], Facebook [56], [57], WhatsApp [42], Instagram [32], electronic mail [58], etc.…”

An Analysis of Whatsapp Emoji in Business Interactions between a Malaysian SME and the Turkish Counterparts

“…Emoji is adapted from Japanese word that is defined as "picture" and "letter" (Danesi, 2017). Emoji are "image characters" or pictographs that are famous and mostly used in WhatsApp Messenger (Annamalai & Abdul, 2017). Hasan (2018) mentions that emoji can be named as a facial emotion, or as a combination of keyboard characters displayed together with a text message showing the mood of the user.…”