Integration of User Emotion and Self-Awareness in Text Messaging

摘要

Text messaging becomes one of the indispensable communication tools today. It has changed the way users efficiently communicate with each other and perceive information. Emojis play an imperative role in attempting to deliver emotional information in text messaging. They compliment texts, but are more flexible in expression, to describe a user's sentiment that is hard to be described by words. Emojis are traditionally selected through picking emoji icons and sent through the chatbox. However, as the representation and interpretation of emojis are subtle and vary from people to people, selecting emotions without carefully estimating one's feeling could lead to misuse and misunderstanding of the emoji message. One technique to increase the thoughtfulness of emoji selection is incorporating facial expressions of emotion. The increased self-awareness could lead to more assessment of internal feeling and encourage selecting the emojis with attention. This study compares three manners of emoji selection techniques on mobile, and evaluate how the self-awareness affects emotion expression in text messaging. The preliminary result shows that higher self-awareness leads to increased thoughtfulness in expressing emotions, and boosts the accuracy of emojis selection based on a user's current mood.