How Multiple Emojis Change the Reader’s Perception of a Message

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Abstract
Messages sent in digital communication today, through apps such as WhatsApp, can often be understood in different ways due to the lack of non-verbal cues such as tone and body language. This causes communication problems to be more prevalent in digital chats than in face-to-face communication. With the help of emojis, some of these aspects can be brought back, such as emotion. Because messages can contain more than one emoji, we aim to determine how the reduplication of emojis influences the perception of messages, and whether demographic aspects have an impact on this effect. We conducted a survey with 1,005 participants that analyzed how participants rate the sentiment of neutral sentences and how their perception changes when the sentences are enriched with increasing numbers of positive, negative, or neutral emojis – up to three. The results show that the perceived sentiment of the sentences got stronger when the emojis were reduplicated. Furthermore, this effect per emoji got weaker the more reduplications were in the sentence. This means that the more reduplications appear, the weaker the effect of each emoji is. Our data showed no evidence that demographic aspects influenced the observed effect.

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