Effects of textual constraint and emojis on emotion inferences for text message senders

Emojis help communicate nonverbal information, such as a sender’s emotional state, in electronic forms of communication. Sometimes, however, the link between an emoji and a sender’s emotional state is less clear, requiring recipients to carefully evaluate the accompanying text to generate an emotion inference. We propose that textual constraint affects how easily a recipient infers a sender’s emotional state from an emoji. Participants judged a text sender’s emotional state from messages that either strongly suggest or weakly suggest the sender’s emotion, with or without an emoji. Results showed participants more easily infer a sender’s emotional state when an emoji is present, but this effect is moderated by textual constraint. Emojis support emotion inferences to a greater relative extent when texts are weakly (rather than strongly) suggestive of the sender’s emotional state. These findings suggest emojis support discourse processes by helping supplement missing or ambiguous details contained within text messages.