Investigating the Influence of Users Personality on the Ambiguous Emoji Perception (2022)

Abstract: Emojis are an integral part of Internet communication nowadays. Even though, they are supposed to make the text clearer and less dubious, some emojis are ambiguous and can be interpreted in different ways. One of the factors that determine the perception of emojis is the user’s personality. In this work, I conducted an experimental study and investigated how personality traits, measured with a Big Five Inventory (BFI) questionnaire, affect reaction time when interpreting emoji. For a set of emoji, for which there are several possible interpretations, participants had to determine whether the emoji fits the presented context or not. Using regression analysis, I found that conscientiousness and neuroticism significantly predict the reaction time the person needs to decide about the emoji. More conscientious people take longer to resolve ambiguity, while more neurotic people make decisions about ambiguous emoji faster. The knowledge of the relationship between personality and emoji interpretation can lead to effective use of knowledge of people’s characters in personalizing interactive computer systems.

## introduction emojis have become incredibly popular on the internet @xcite . one reason for that is that text messaging is one of the most common communication channels now. but yet being convenient and enabling communication at a distance, text communication is not as expressive as live speech @xcite . since we can read the text with different intonations, text messages can be easily misunderstood. emojis, which are pictograms depicting human faces, gestures and objects, partially solve this problem by augmenting text with emotional awareness cues. however, despite being the visual representation, emoji can have the same ambiguity as words at the lexical meaning level @xcite . even though usually emoji are used within the context, which in theory should work well in both directions: emoji complement and resolve the ambiguity of the text, and the emoji itself in conjunction with the text should not cause difficulties in interpretation, it doesn't always work. and for different reasons, the same emoji can be interpreted differently by different people. one of the plain explanations is that emoji rendering is specific to different operating systems, for example, for apple and google smartphones, and the same emoji can look quite different on different devices. moreover, operating systems update rendering with newer versions and even users of the same device and platform may see slightly different emojis depending on whether they have updated their software or not. finally, emojis diverge on different platforms. for example, facebook uses a fairly specific rendering, quite different from the basic one. of course, this affects how people perceive the same emoji and can have an impact on communication @xcite . however, the perception of emojis can depend not only on the technical characteristics of the device but also on the person using them. research shows that how a person interprets emojis is influenced by age, gender, cultural background @xcite @xcite . but most studies address the issue of flattering differences at the level of group characteristics, and not many research analyze the influence of user personality on the interpretation of emoji. the existing ones mainly analyze emojis isolated from the context @xcite . while taking into account that we usually see emojis as complementary to the text, it is important to analyze them within the context. thus, in this work, i'm trying to touch on this gap, and understand if there is a connection between the personality of the user and the way he perceives emoji within the text context -in the form in which we usually see emoji. so my research question is: do personality traits have an impact on how people perceive ambiguous emojis in context? to address these questions, i conducted an experimental study in which i presented people with ambiguous emoji, for which two more or less equivalent contexts are possible, and measured the time it took for them to decide whether the presented emoji fits the context or not. the participants then completed a bfi survey to determine their personality profiles. finally, using regression analysis, i tested if there is a significant effect of different personality traits on reaction time when resolving emoji ambiguity. my results show that conscientiousness and neuroticism significantly predict the reaction time the person needs to decide about the emoji. more conscientious people take longer to resolve ambiguity, while more neurotic people make decisions about ambiguous emoji faster. the interaction with the context presented affects the impact of both conscientiousness and neuroticism on the reaction time. thus, the contributions of this work are as follows: first, i try to address the gap in the studies of the link between user personality and emoji interpretation. second, this study explores how people with different personalities perceive not standalone but emojis in context as we usually see them in text messaging. finally, to my knowledge, existing research examines the perception of emoji in terms of choosing a qualitative interpretation, while i measure the relationship between personality and perception of emotional ambiguity by measuring reaction time. when we speak in person, our language is enriched with non-verbal cues such as facial expressions, gestures and intonation @xcite . however, text messaging, despite its advantages as the ability to communicate at a distance and respond at a convenient time, is devoid of a nonverbal communication channel. from this, the sender and the recipient can intonate and interpret the same text in different ways, which can cause misunderstanding @xcite . one possible way to mitigate this problem is by using emoji -pictograms that reflect facial expressions, gestures, or objects @xcite . they can serve as a replacement for gestures or emotions of the interlocutor and thereby make the text less ambiguous. lo discovered that the same text could be understood in different ways, depending on which emoticon is placed after it @xcite . walther and d'addario, on the one hand, found that, in general, the emotional colouring of the text itself is more important for interpretation than the emoticons. however, in the case of emoticons displaying negative emotions, the interpretation of the text changed significantly @xcite . thus, among the most common reasons found as the result of qualitative research, people use emojis to heighten the emotional colouring of the text @xcite . another reason is to clarify the tone of the initially neutral message. for example, as a result of interviewing people, cramer et al. found that people can add "heart" or "kiss" to add a romantic context to the neutral message ("see you ") @xcite . sometimes emojis add situational meaning, for example, "i am travelling to germany next week ," explaining that person will go to germany by plane @xcite . another common reason to use emojis is to lighten the tone of the message and make people perceive aggressive messages more positively @xcite . lastly, a few studies mention the emoji's function as referring to shared memories and jokes and increasing intimacy and closeness between people @xcite @xcite . ## results in this section, i report the results of regression models @xcite . i got statistically significant results for the (1) model predicting the reaction time with conscientiousness and context as an interaction, (2) model predicting the reaction time with neuroticism and context as an interaction, and (3) model with all bfi scores as predictors. the separate models with agreeableness, openness and extraversion and context as a predictor were statistically insignificant. in the following subsection, i describe the model performances in more detail. i provide the output of the models in appendix 3. ## limitations and discussion i ran an experiment to explore whether there is a link between how people perceive ambiguous emojis and their personality traits. with the regression analysis, i found that the scores on conscientiousness and neuroticism serve as significant predictors of how much time does it take for a person to resolve the ambiguity in emoji, with more conscientious people needing more time and more neurotic people needing less time to decide about an ambiguous emoji. for both significant variables, the interaction effect of the context was also significant. openness, agreeableness and extraversion did not show any significant effect on the reaction time. these results are in line with previous research. lots of studies demonstrated that people scoring high on neuroticism, even though performing poor on the complex and stressful tasks, show high performance on simple and repeated tasks @xcite @xcite . in turn, conscientious people tend to overestimate the importance of tasks, which makes their learning times and decision-making slower @xcite @xcite . the importance of context variables as an interaction also supports previous research claiming the importance of semantics for emoji interpretation @xcite @xcite . considering previous research, i might interpret my results in a way that conscientious people being achievement striving, careful and not impulsive tend to solve any tasks more responsively, read the context carefully and need more time to decide about the meaning of the emoji. neurotic people being anxious and impulsive, might make their decisions in a less analytic and more emotional and spontaneous way. what is more, trying to minimize the effect of culture on the results, i recruited participants from the same country of origin. however, having that context as an important interaction variable might mean that, first, the semantic wrapping is important in interpreting emoji, but also that people from same countries have similar information resources and patterns of communication. therefore, one of the contexts might be more intuitive and familiar to them. the study has several limitations. first, my sample was biased towards females, and since the related work has found that gender can influence the interpretation of the emojis @xcite @xcite , the analysis might benefit from a more balanced data. moreover, i did not restrict the users to use the same operational systems, and even though i controlled the renderings of emojis on the experimental platform, people who usually use different operating systems and use different renderings might have some confusion seeing the appearance of emojis to which they are not used to. finally, to deal with the sequence effects, i showed the emojis randomly, and due to the limitations of the psytoolkit platform, i was not able to make a latin square counterbalancing remembering the order of emoji for each of the participants. it would be nice to see whether some possibly confusing emoji affect the reaction time needed to decide about the following one. in this research, i concentrated only on participants' reaction times. future work might benefit from adding their answers about whether they found the emoji suitable or not. what is more, only by-subject analysis is performed in this study. i performed an exploratory analysis by-item and found noticeably high average reaction times for the following emojis , , . future work will include by-item analysis and explore the difference in reaction times between people with different personalities for each of the emojis, fitting a separate regression model for all of them. considering implications, nowadays, smartphones and laptops have become an integral part of our lives, and interactive computer systems are becoming more adaptive, tracking our behaviour and modelling search results based on it, suggesting words and stickers. with a knowledge of how people with different personality traits interpret emojis in different systems and applications can improve the user experience. for example, it is possible to communicate ambiguity by using ambiguous emojis in correspondence between people with different personality profiles, thereby reducing miscommunication. for instance, highlighting emojis, which other person tend to use with different contexts, or suggesting alternative less ambiguous emojis. what is more, the user's personality can be taken to account in the automatic reply systems and chatbots. ## conclusion because of the spread of text communication methods, emojis became popular, and serve as a kind of replacement for non-verbal emotional cues. this should make the text less ambiguous and eliminate miscommunication. however, different people may interpret emojis in different ways. few studies explored the relationship between personality and how people perceive emojis. however, most of the existing research concentrates on emojis out of context, while they are usually used as an addition to text. in this paper, i tried to address this gap and investigated how users with different personality traits perceive emoji ambiguity in context. i found that conscientiousness increases the time it takes a person to resolve an emoji ambiguity. on the contrary, people with a high level of neuroticism make decisions about the interpretation of emojis faster. the context turned out to be a significant interaction effect. thus, it can be concluded that personality traits have a relationship with how users perceive and interpret emojis. these findings can be used in the design of responsive, interactive systems, make their use more personalized and reduce miscommunication in text messaging.