An Empirical Study on the Communication and Usage Psychology of Emoji in Wechat

As an indispensable active atmosphere and meaningful emotional expression in social media, emojis describe the emotions of users specific situations a funny, humorous, euphemistic, implicit form attract to use them consciously or unconsciously with their quick convenient features. Currently, research on psychology emoji usage is mostly from perspective users, while neglecting essential attributes emojis. The purpose this study was investigate summarize multi-dimensional factors that affect communication elucidate influence use. This took WeChat (the most widely used instant messaging app China) as object. Data were collected utilizing semi-structured interviews questionnaires. SPSS 25.0 software applied conduct exploratory factor analysis relevant data explore several dimensions users’ psychology. results showed gender, age, education, occupation important affecting had characteristics according self-determination theory, it could be divided into internal external factors. included information, efficiency, entertainment, communicativeness, culture, image, fuzziness, context. Notably, fuzziness has described critical role emojis, which complemented neglect previous studies, might provide direction for design